SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
https://yellowstoneinsider.com/2018/09/04/wolves-fewer-elk-yellowstone-aspen-comeback/
But with the reintroduction of wolves, the elk population has gone down significantly — from almost 20,000 in 1995 to around 7,500 in the latest estimates — and during that time scientists have documented a Yellowstone aspen comeback. That’s part of a larger picture of restoring balance to the ecosystem. The aspen already face a variety of challenges from insects and the like.
A 2010 study did not find any impact on aspen with the reintroduction of wolves, but a new study, published in the journal Ecosphere, did. Here’s a synopsis of the study from Oregon State:
This is the first large-scale study to show that aspen is recovering in areas around the park, as well as inside the park boundary, said Luke Painter, a wildlife ecologist at Oregon State University and lead author on the study. Wolves were reintroduced to the park in 1995. The study shows their predation on elk is a major reason for new growth of aspen, a tree that plays an important ecological role in the American West.
Wolves are culling the elk herd, adding to the effects of bears, cougars, and hunters outside the park, which means less elk are browsing on aspen and other woody species. The presence of wolves has also resulted in most of the elk herd spending winter outside of the park, Painter said. Before wolf restoration, even when elk numbers were similarly low, most of the elk stayed in the park.
"What we're seeing in Yellowstone is the emergence of an ecosystem that is more normal for the region and one that will support greater biodiversity," Painter said. "Restoring aspen in northern Yellowstone has been a goal of the National Park Service for decades. Now they've begun to achieve that passively, by having the animals do it for them. It's a restoration success story."….
The study answers the question of whether the return of wolves to Yellowstone could have a cascading effect on ecosystems outside the park, Painter said, where there is much more human activity such as hunting, livestock grazing, and predator control. There has also been skepticism surrounding the extent and significance of aspen recovery, he said.
[Editor's Note: Related - there has been a lot of interest generated in this topic from this TED talk]
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday September 19 2018, @10:34AM (1 child)
Given some time to think about that PDF, maybe I've been unfairly critical of it.
The professor apparently wrote his essay with time constraints. There was probably little editing, and no final proof reading. The document was meant to be "published" in a very limited edition - for a jury in a court case.
Basic spelling? Ehhhh, we all do that right here, on Soylent. Grammar? I retract that comlaint - I may be the worst offender on Soylent. When time is important, grammar just falls by the wayside.
I still feel that the professor maintained detachment throughout his career, then when predators came close enough to make things personal, he lost that detachment.
And, I still feel that wolves are an important part of our ecosystem.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Reziac on Wednesday September 19 2018, @02:34PM
He probably didn't appreciate being stalked near his home, no..He's a wildlife biologist, not an author of fine literature. I don't really care. There's plenty of confirmation of what he contends, if one bothers to look beyond the mindset created by a generation who took Farley Mowat to be research rather than fiction. When I'm trying to get everything down without losing any concepts, I can get pretty disorganized too, and I used to edit college papers for money. (Right now I'm trying to beat the clock and get to this before I forget.)
He has another paper, which I don't have bookmarked or time to dredge up this instant, specifically about why people get attacked by deer and wild sheep, and how badly their behavior is usually misinterpreted. I've seen this same behavior with domestic sheep -- just before a ram decides to deck someone. But you might want to sub to the RSS feed at http://wolfeducationinternational.com/ [wolfeducationinternational.com] -- it's enlightening. Here's today's entry:
http://wolfeducationinternational.com/dr-v-geist-speech-big-game-forever-banquet-and-wolf-symposium/ [wolfeducationinternational.com]
Unfortunately the "Crying Wolf" documentary is no longer available, but it dug into the Cui Bono aspect of the "wolf reintroduction" thing, and turns out it was partly a scam to suck money from the public coffers, and partly an animal-rights campaign designed to make ranching unprofitable. But the only time "ecosystem balance" came up was when they needed to convince an urban public who don't have to live with the consequences (other than the rising price of meat, which of course gets blamed on "greedy ranchers"). Further, it pointed out how in Canada, wolves are so far from endangered that they're hunted via aircraft full-time and are still thriving (numbers are estimated at about 38,000). But come across the 49th and suddenly they're "endangered". Wolves were not native to Yellowstone in the first place (wolves are not actually high-mountain critters; and since we still had timber wolves in MT, doncha think if the vast protected area of Yellowstone was actually wolf habitat, there'd still have been some in the park?), so naturally they soon spread far beyond it.
And the regional varieties of wolves are not different species, they're more like closely-related breeds (eg. Malinois vs Belgian). However -- there's another problem with "wolf reintroduction". We still had timber wolves in Montana, occasionally caught by wildlife cams, but very shy and seldom seen by humans; they almost never took livestock or stalked humans the woods. Numbers were estimated at 60-90, a good amount for their range. They also averaged about 90 pounds. The imported wolves were MacKenzie grays, which run around 160 pounds and are a lot less shy, and their numbers are already into the several hundreds. And they killed off not only the native timber wolves, but also most of the coyotes (so now we have an overgrowth of rabbits), and are busy exterminating the elk, whose population has dropped to 10-20% of what it was. Most of the West is already undergrazed (that, not overgrazing, causes desertification; see Alan Savory's work) and "aspen recovery" is kinda like saying "weed recovery". If new shoots don't get browsed down, pretty soon ALL you have is a solid mat of aspen, because it spreads by cloning and tends to choke out everything in its path. And aspen are not a useful timber species, either.
Undergrazed, you exclaim? Consider: best estimate for the U.S. was around 120 million bison prior to settlement (altho already in rapid decline). One bison eats about 2.5 times as much as one cow. There are now about 80 million cattle on the same range -- meaning it is now severely undergrazed. This has led to native grasses and forbes, which evolved to be grazed and don't do well when they're not, being replaced by sagebrush and tumbleweeds (both invasive species), and eventually by bare dirt. I have personally observed this when I lived in the desert. So long as the big commercial sheep flocks came through a couple times a year (a good simulation of wild-type grazing), we had native grass and wildflowers. When they stopped coming, within three years we had weeds and increasingly, exposed dirt.
But, you exclaim, desert tortoises!! Er, no.
The Desert Tortoise in Relation to Cattle Grazing -
https://journals.uair.arizona.edu/index.php/rangelands/article/viewFile/10776/10049 [arizona.edu]
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.