Drought, Fires, and Large Mammals

Yellowstone National Park is renowned for its fauna of diverse and numerous large mammals. This article focuses on elk, because they are overwhelmingly the dominant park ungulate both in number and total mass. In early 1988 on the northern winter range, there were five times as many elk as all other...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Bioscience 1989-11, Vol.39 (10), p.716-722
Main Authors: Singer, Francis J., Schreier, William, Oppenheim, Jill, Garton, Edward O.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Cervus elaphus
Deaths
Drought
Elk
Elk (Wapiti)
Elks
Environmental aspects
Forage
Forest & brush fires
Forest fires
Grasslands
Grizzly bears
Herds
Idaho
Mammals
Montana
Mortality
National parks
Natural disasters
Patient outcomes
Ungulates
Wildlife
Wildlife ecology
Wyoming
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Summary:Yellowstone National Park is renowned for its fauna of diverse and numerous large mammals. This article focuses on elk, because they are overwhelmingly the dominant park ungulate both in number and total mass. In early 1988 on the northern winter range, there were five times as many elk as all other types of ungulates combined. At the time of the 1988 drought and fires in Yellowstone, studies of the northern range were reevaluating the success of the natural regulation experiment. Extensive burning in 1988 occurred on five out of the seven elk summer ranges. All four of the elk winter ranges had from 2-50% of their areas burned. No previously published study has documented burning effects on such a large scale across the entire year-round ranges of several large elk herds.
ISSN:0006-3568
1525-3244
DOI:10.2307/1311003