Protected Areas of the Northern Great Plains

            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”).

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 19^th and 20^th 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.

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. 

Suffield National Wildlife Area sits alongside the Saskatchewan River in Alberta, Canada. (Image courtesy of Environment Canada)