Exactly where Wyoming’s big game animals migrate throughout the year has long been a question that remains unanswered, but the Wyoming Migration Initiative is working on a solution.
With 2014 being the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act and the 30th anniversary of the Wyoming Wilderness Act, researchers at the University of Wyoming partnered with cartographers at the University of Oregon in order to produce a short film that maps out the exact routes of several of Wyoming’s elk, mule deer, moose, bighorn sheep and pronghorn populations. The project focuses on herds in the Yellowstone National Park and Grand Teton National Park areas of northwest Wyoming.
Matthew Kaufman, UW zoology and physiology professor, led the project and is also head of the Wyoming Migration Initiative.
“It was a fun way to get some of our migration data out to the public by connecting the migration map with our wilderness areas data,” Kauffman said. “Lots of people know where Wyoming’s wilderness areas are because they go there to hike or maybe hunt and fish. The idea was to combine people’s understanding of where wilderness areas are in the state with our new information about migration routes in the state.”
The Wyoming Migration Initiative and the campus Biodiversity Institute coproduced the video, with assistance from Joe Riss, videographer, and Emily Ostlind, scriptwriter.
“The film is about trying to educate the public on where these routes are,” Kauffman said. “The piece of the puzzle that wilderness represents with respect to migration.”
It is part of a four-year project by the Initiative to create an atlas detailing the migration routes of all Wyoming’s big game herds.
“This project is part of a larger project which is mapping the migration routes of all of the herds that we have in the state for which we have done GPS collar studies,” Kaufman said. “As that info gets folded into the larger project, then the long term goal is to start to understand where the critical corridors are that are used by multiple different herds and even multiple different species.”
When the study is complete two years from now, the state will have a complete map detailing migration patterns for each species of Wyoming’s big game animals, including individual herds.
The research will be key in conservation efforts throughout the state, Kauffman said, adding that land managers will know where the critical corridors are located, helping them find ways to keep the routes clear for big game herds.
