Wildlife and Terrestrial Species

Natural resource decision makers face numerous challenges in terms of making choices to solve complex management problems. Many of these challenges stem from being overwhelmed by too many choices, uncertain or delayed outcomes, and multiple stakeholders with conflicting desires. Decision analysis (a.k.a. structured decision making) is set of qualitative and quantitative tools for structuring an...

The Prairie Pothole Region of the northern Great Plains annually hosts 50–80% of North America’s ducks during the breeding season. Accordingly, there are significant government and private funds that go to conservation for the purposes of improving duck production in the region. The Prairie Pothole Region ecosystem has a number of stressors, intensive agriculture being chief among them. The...

Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center (NPWRC) leads a collaborative effort, spanning several studies, with the objective of improving techniques to assess the quality of spring migration habitat for ducks. Spring is a critical time in in the life cycle of migratory ducks because during migration they experience peak energetic needs at a time when food resources are often at their scarcest...

Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center (NPWRC) recently completed a project aimed at understanding the impacts of wetland drainage on wetlands that receive drainage water. The biological communities of prairie pothole wetlands evolved in a hydrologically dynamic system due to periodic wet and dry conditions. NPWRC research indicates that relative to wetlands in undrained landscapes, wetlands...

This effort is aimed at understanding how productivity of larger and more permanent wetlands is influenced by a combination of inter-annual hydrological dynamics and land-use impacts. Historically, aquatic-invertebrates productivity and abundance was driven by inter-annual hydrological dynamics because drying periods allow for nutrient cycling and a subsequent pulse of productivity when wet...

Emergent sandbar maps of the Missouri River produced by Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center continue to be used by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to monitor and manage critical breeding habitat for the endangered Interior population of least terns and the threatened Northern Great Plains population of piping plovers. These maps have been created and...

During summer 2017, Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center (NPWRC) initiated a collaborative research study focused on understanding if water-level management of wetlands at refuges can influence mercury bioaccumulation in wetland-dependent migratory birds. Birds are susceptible to the effects of mercury and can serve as indicators of contamination in ecosystems. We examined mercury...

The recent expansion of unconventional oil and gas development in the Williston Basin of North America has raised concerns among managers about potential negative effects of such development on grassland birds. Others, however, have argued that agricultural land use in the region has had a much larger impact and that energy development may be a comparatively small stressor for grassland birds...

Badlands National Park contains the largest contiguous bison range in the core of the species’ historic range on the northern Great Plains. The park nevertheless is too small to accommodate natural movements of free-ranging bison. As a result, continual grazing by resident bison has supplanted intense-but-ephemeral grazing by nomadic bison. The herd also is currently too small to prevent gradual...

Wolves on Ellesmere Island, just south of the North Pole, survive in extreme cold during 24 hours of darkness per day from November through January, and survive in much higher temperatures during 24 hours of light per day from April through September. Partnering with other agencies, we use GPS radio collars applied to wolves during summer to examine wolf-pack movements on Ellesmere Island...

The National Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reintroduced wolves into Yellowstone National Park in 1995 and 1996. This study helps assess that population’s recovery and determine factors that affect the population, including diseases, intraspecific strife, and interactions with prey. The restoration has been very successful, and the population has persisted for more than 20 years...

The presence or absence of an endangered species on the landscape can have significant policy implications for public land managers and private landowners. The Dakota Skipper, a grassland dependent butterfly, was recently listed as a threatened species under The Endangered Species Act in 2014. This listing has created controversy in the states of North and South Dakota because of the potential...