The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) is a vast and diverse region spanning over 20 million acres across Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho in the United States. Renowned for its stunning landscapes, including towering mountains, vast forests, and expansive grasslands, the GYE is home to iconic natural features such as Yellowstone National Park, Grand Teton National Park, and numerous wilderness areas and wildlife refuges.

This ecosystem serves as a sanctuary for a rich array of wildlife, including grizzly bears, wolves, bison, elk, and countless other species. Its intricate web of interconnected habitats supports one of the last intact temperate ecosystems on Earth, fostering remarkable biodiversity and ecological resilience.

The human footprint in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) refers to the cumulative impact of human activities on the region's natural environment and wildlife. This footprint encompasses a range of factors, including urban and rural land development, infrastructure construction, recreational activities, resource extraction, and transportation networks. Urban and rural development within and around the GYE can lead to habitat loss, fragmentation, and degradation, which can disrupt wildlife migration patterns, alter ecosystems, and threaten biodiversity.

Scientific research links wildland habitat loss with two prevailing variables—human footprint and deepening stressors brought about by climate change, bringing about warmer temperatures and less water abundance related to altered cycles of precipitation.

The baseline of understanding, derived from research, is that if the Earth and its inhabitants are to survive together, there is a need for recognition that the loss of wildland habitat and its species will result in higher vulnerability of Earth to be negatively impacted by climate change. Whereas science has established that species suffer from higher rates of extirpation and extinction when habitat shrinks and becomes “islandized” into ever smaller fragments, the inverse is also true. Resilient ecosystems, ones that support biological diversity, are those that enable quality habitat for species to roam further in times of stress. Moreover, landscapes that serve as better refugia for wildlife are additionally better equipped to maintain water quality and store carbon dioxide through healthier soils and vegetation.

In the past few decades, Greater Yellowstone has come under unprecedented pressure from different types and scales of human impact that range from tourism to the development of private lands—lands that have been open and accessible for wildlife migrations due to their historically complimentary human land uses, originally through the movement patterns of Indigenous Americans, and more recently through ranching and farming.

Greater Yellowstone is experiencing rapid land transformation in which agrarian and undeveloped lands are being converted into residential suburban and exurban subdivision, especially by wealthier property owners who can afford to live there and are interested in building dream homes, often for only seasonal habitation.

In the absence of ecologically-driven planning and zoning, that proscribes where structures can more benignly be sited vs. places that hold highest value as secure habitat for species, migration corridors are becoming fractured. Think of wildlife migrations as an electrical system or even circulatory system in which energy or blood is distributed throughout the human body. Hundreds of thousands of elk, mule deer and pronghorn convert sunlight energy through the vegetation they consume into body mass and their movement then makes the caloric energy available to a wide array of other species. Not only do ungulates in their grazing habits nurture vibrant native plant communities that evolved through herbivory, but those animals when they die provide caloric sustenance to iconic predators such as grizzly bears, wolves, mountain lions, coyotes, foxes, birds of prey, medium-sized and smaller mammals, birds and other scavengers.

If migration corridors become blocked by development and subdivisions, scientists say the effect is analogous to a human suffering from a clogged artery and being afflicted with a stroke or heart attack. The entire biophysical body of Greater Yellowstone can be harmed and the net result of fragmentation would be the loss of species as has happened in 95 percent of the rest of the Lower 48 states. Hence, where we build, how we build, at what level of intensity and density are issues that are of existential importance in pondering the future of Greater Yellowstone. Examining this important challenge is one that academia, by design, is intended to address, for it yields big picture holistic thinkers who will be shaping and living in the future their decisions create.