Preserving Land for Northward Migration

A new report from a conservation group about the wildlands that surround Glacier National Park in Montana and Canada says that unprotected public lands within the “Crown of the Continent” ecosystem should be protected to assure that the wildest ecosystem in the country stays that way as the climate changes.

The report, by John Weaver, a longtime wildlife researcher with the Wildlife Conservation Society, which is based in the Bronx, gathered data from 30 biologists and incorporated 300 scientific papers on the subject. Dr. Weaver also did firsthand fact-checking of the report, hiking and riding a horse through the rugged territory for four months.

The ecosystem covers about 250 miles, north to south, from the Bob Marshall Wilderness, up to the Canadian Rockies. This area and Yellowstone are the only places in the United States where the full suite of species remains intact.

An unsettled climate is expected to bring change to the mountains, forests and rivers of the ecosystem. As temperatures warm, fish will move upstream to stay in water that is cold enough for them. The snow line is moving up-slope, and wolverines need to follow, for they need deep snow to raise their young. And important grizzly bear foods like huckleberries are expected to migrate or disappear, which would mean that bears would need to move as well.

“If wildlife has both a range of elevation to shift upwards and the possibility to move north, it gives them a lot of ecological options in a future with a lot of uncertainty,” Dr. Weaver said.

Protecting corridors — the land needed so wildlife species in one place can connect to other important habitat — is a conservation priority these days. A grizzly bear may lose one food source and need to find another, but it may find its peregrinations blocked by a new housing development or logging operation.

The Crown of the Continent ecosystem has more than three million acres of federally protect wild lands. There is an additional 1.3 million acres of road-free land in and around the ecosystem, which means it is eligible for protection as wilderness, but not yet protected.

In the report Dr. Weaver recommends that two-thirds of the land (888,000 acres) be protected as wilderness. Some 310,000 acres could be managed without the strictest wilderness protections, while remaining primitive. The remaining 10 percent of the landscape is not as vital and does not need the same level of protection, the report says.

Protection for so much federal land would take an act of Congress and be a huge political challenge. Already, 3.3 million acres in Montana are federally protected, and adding so much new land would be controversial because it would ban logging and motorized vehicle use.

Julia Altemus, executive vice president of the Montana Wood Products Association, whose members are in the timber industry, said she had not seen the report and could not comment on it. But wilderness affects local communities the most, she said, and the people who live near the proposed wilderness should have a say.

“That would be quite an increase,” she said of the total acres recommended for protection. “It’s up to the local communities to make those decisions because that’s where the greatest impacts are.”