Today, the Northern Great Plains of North
America—once as ecologically diverse as the African savannah—is extremely
endangered due to overgrazing, intensive agriculture and natural resource
extraction. Only 2% of the millions of hectares of the Northern Great Plains is
currently protected in reserves, making it one of the most endangered
ecosystems on earth. The protected areas that do exist are distributed
throughout the two Canadian provinces and five U.S. states that make up the
Northern Great Plains. Some are privately owned, while others are public domain
stewarded by conservation agencies (“Northern Great Plains, USA & Canada”).
One such public protected area is
the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge (NWR), which spans over 1
million acres of short grasslands along the Missouri River in Montana (“About
the Refuge – Charles M. Russell”). The area was officially established in 1978
when an existing game range was renamed and consolidated under the National
Wildlife Refuge System Administration Act of 1966 (“History of the Refuge –
Charles M. Russell”). Managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in an
effort to conserve the area’s wildlife and habitat today and into the future,
the Charles M. Russell NWR is the second-largest Refuge in the contiguous
United States. It is home to several native Grassland species, including elk,
bighorn sheep, and bald eagles; and it boasts a landscape rich with prairies, rivers
and coulees (ravines) (“Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge”). Much of
the Charles M. Russell NWR has been left rather untouched because of the area’s
extensive size and remoteness (“About the Refuge”). Nonetheless, the area was
once home to the largest wild bison herd in North America, which decades of
human settlement and overexploitation of resources decimated. Moreover, limited
funding and declining public interest could threaten the future health and
longevity of the Reserve. Today, however, the efforts of groups such as the
National Wildlife Federation are helping to improve the status of this
protected area. Bison are slowly being reintroduced in free-roaming herds, and
the Refuge monitors the numbers of endangered species to ensure sustainable populations.
The strong long-term management plan advocated by the National Wildlife Federation
and the Nature Conservancy holds the potential to restore the area’s species
and habitat, further improving its status (“Charles M. Russell”).
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| Bison, once nearly extinct in the Northern Great Plains, have recently been reintroduced to the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge. (Image courtesy of mountainwestnews.org) |
An important protected area in
Canada is Grasslands National Park, located in southwest Saskatchewan. It is
the only national park in Canada that protects the mixed-grass prairie
ecosystem and contains the most undisturbed tract of native prairie in the
country (“Grasslands National Park: Introduction”). A variety of geological features
from wooded coulees to grasslands to sand dunes characterize the Park, a rich
ecosystem that contains over 40 types of grasses. The Park is the only place in
Canada where the black-tailed prairie dog still exists in its natural habitat.
The black-footed ferret, North America’s most endangered mammal, also calls the
Park home. The critical status of these two species, along with the burrowing
owl and greater prairie chicken, pose a threat to the livelihood of species
that prey on them, such as coyotes, foxes, wolves, and hawks. Efforts by the
Park and the Nature Conservancy of Canada (which is currently purchasing land
from ranchers to add to the park) aim to reintroduce self-sustaining, wild
populations of coyotes and wolves, which have been highly endangered since the 1930s,
have thus far been rather successful (“Grasslands National Park”). Megafauna
such as bison, elk, and grizzly bears have all but completely disappeared from
Grasslands National Park because of hundreds of year of over-plowing the
grasslands and over-slaughtering these species as prescribed by various
homestead and land development acts in the 19th and 20th
centuries, though a bison re-introduction project began in 2006 when 70 bison
were brought from Elk Island National Park in Alberta (The Gazette (Montreal)). Thus because the Grasslands National Park
is heavily protected under Canadian law and through the work of the World
Wildlife Federation and similar conservation agencies, it will likely continue
to thrive into the future as a protected area and site of tourist interest.
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| Grasslands National Park, located in Saskatchewan along the Montana border, is split into a western and an eastern portion. (Image courtesy of greatcanadianparks.com) |
Suffield National Wildlife Area
(NWA) in Alberta, Canada, is another crucial protected area of the Northern
Great Plains. The NWA is one of the largest, most ecologically diverse areas of
untouched grassland remaining in Canada, making it the most likely of any NWA
to be able to recover lost habitat and species on a large scale. Suffield NWA,
protected as part of the Canadian Forces Base Suffield since 1971, was formally
established in 2003 for this exact reason (“Canadian Forces Base Suffield
National Wildlife Area”). It contains grasslands, ancient glacial valleys,
coulees, sand hills, cottonwood forests, small wetlands, and the Saskatchewan
River. Nearly one hundred endangered species inhabit the Suffield NWA (Pence).
Some, like the western prairie mouse, are endemic to the area; and all of them
depend on grasslands-specific climate and fire conditions to survive. Suffield
NWA is protected under the Canada Wildlife Act and the National Defense Act,
which prohibits public access and human activities like hunting or recreation.
Despite strict protections that have precipitated a rather good environmental
status for the area, like in the vast majority of the Northern Great Plains,
bison have disappeared from the Suffield NWA. In 1997, elk were reintroduced to
fill the large herbivore niche vacated by bison. Suffield has been a site of
contention between environmentalists and natural gas companies; for it contains
more than one thousand gas wells and an extensive accompanying network of
pipelines, owned jointly by Alberta’s provincial government and the federal government
(“Canadian Forces Base Suffield National Wildlife Area”). In 2005, the EnCana
Corporation put forward a proposal to more than double the number of shallow
natural gas wells. Seven years later in 2012, the federal government rejected the
proposal, citing threats to at-risk wildlife, environmental degradation, and
public concern as outweighing potential benefits of the project (Pence). Today,
Suffield NWA remains highly valued as a space of environmental diversity and
thus well-protected from future drilling projects.
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| Suffield National Wildlife Area sits alongside the Saskatchewan River in Alberta, Canada. (Image courtesy of Environment Canada) |
