What drives Yellowstone’s elk migrations?

“This [study] provides great insight into the adaptation strategies of elk to climate change in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem,” said Jonathan Jarvis, former director of the National Park Service, who now serves as executive director of the Institute for Parks, People, and Biodiversity at UC Berkeley. “The maps clearly demonstrate the need to think and operate at the landscape scale,” Jarvis said, “For the park managers, this kind of research gives them options and incentives, such as protection of migration corridors and seasonal habitats, for ensuring elk and other keystone species in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem will persist.” “We’ve been observing a lot of really interesting changes over the past decade about the way that elk are moving across the landscape, specifically of the timing of the migrations,” said Courtemanch, who supplied GPS data on the Jackson herd for the study.

Source: news.berkeley.edu