American Bison - Buffalo Field Campaign

• Creating education,
awareness and outreach
programmes to public
and policy-making
constituencies,
• Building capacity
among key stakeholder
groups, and
• Working across
international borders,
where necessary.”
Participants in the
Vermejo workshop were
asked to map areas
where “ecological recovery might be possible” over three time
frames (20, 50, and 100 years), considering future trends in land
use, economic development, demography, and climate. The
resulting maps provide a subjective, visual hypothesis of the
most promising places for ecological recovery (Sanderson et al.
2008). The maps illustrate that potential for ecological recovery
exists throughout North America. Long-term opportunities
are apparent across much of the original range of the plains
bison, from private agricultural, state, and national grazing
lands in northern Mexico and southern New Mexico, to the
agriculture-dominated, mixed tenure landscapes of the Northern
Great Plains. In northern regions of the continent, wood bison
populations exceeding a thousand animals are already present
in three large landscapes in Canada, and a new initiative will
restore one or more populations in interior Alaska.
The kinds of large areas required to achieve ideal ecological
restoration of bison are likely to be managed by several
jurisdictions, and may also involve private landowners. Achieving
agreement on restoring bison to such landscapes is challenging
prospect, requiring principled, long-term development planning,
soundly based on community-based conservation development
praxis (see: Bopp and Bopp 2006, for practical guidelines for
community development).
10.2.2 Principles for ecological restoration
applicable to bison
Successful ecological restoration of bison as wildlife on
multi-tenured landscapes requires careful
assessment and collaborative planning.
While some restoration projects will emerge
from government and non-profit organisation
initiatives, private landowners may initiate
others. In many cases, assembling a sufficiently
large landscape (tens or hundreds of thousands
of hectares) for ecological restoration will
require cooperation between public and private
landowners.
“‘Ecosystem’ means
a dynamic complex of
plant, animal and micro-
organism communities
and their non-living
environment interacting as
a functional unit” (Article
2 of the Convention on
Biological Diversity).
The American Bison Specialist Group considered documents
published by IUCN and the Society for Ecological Restoration
Science and the Policy Working Group, and drew upon the
professional and practical experiences of its members, and
other participants, to develop the following guiding principles for
agencies and non-profit conservation organisations interested in
ecological restoration of bison:
1) Goals concerning the management of land, water, and
living resources, including bison restoration, are a matter of
societal choice.
2) Ecological restoration of bison is an interdisciplinary and
inclusive undertaking requiring the involvement of all
relevant sectors of society and scientific disciplines.
3) Planning and management of ecological restoration
projects should be decentralised to the lowest appropriate
level, as close as possible to the human community within
a local ecosystem, and supported by the highest levels of
government policy.
4) All forms of relevant information, including scientific,
indigenous and local knowledge, and innovations
and practices, should be considered in planning and
implementing bison restoration.
5) Understanding and addressing economic drivers is
imperative for successful ecological restoration of bison,
including:
a. Reducing market distortions that adversely affect
conservation of bison as wildlife;
b. Developing incentives to promote conservation of
ecologically functioning bison populations and their
sustainable uses; and
c. To the extent possible, internalising the costs
and benefits of managing bison as wildlife in an
ecologically restored landscape.
6) Ecological restoration of bison should be undertaken at
appropriate spatial and temporal scales, and should focus
on restoring ecological structure, processes, functions, and
interactions within a defined ecosystem.
“A functional conservation area maintains the focal species,
communities, and/or systems, and their supporting ecological
processes within their natural ranges of variability (i.e., the
amount of fluctuation expected in biodiversity patterns and
ecological processes under minimal or no influence from
human activities)” (Poiani and Richter undated).
American Bison: Status Survey and Conservation Guidelines 2010 105