Wildlife diseases, bisected migration corridors, shrinking habitat, fences, roads, and encroaching resource development all translate into increased stress for Wyoming’s wandering big game herds. But now there is a plan that spells relief—at least along the upper stretches of the Snake River—the Jackson Interagency Habitat Initiative or JIHI for short.

Once the upper Snake River provided abundant fall, winter and spring habitat for free-ranging, native ungulates. Settlement by pioneers and ranchers began to change all that. Today, habitat has been fragmented and wildlife now compete with livestock for forage on public lands.

In addition, a century of fire suppression has changed the natural habitat by encouraging conifer encroachment into aspen groves and sagebrush grasslands further reducing the forage available to wildlife. With more animals concentrated on fewer acres, density-dependent diseases such as brucellosis, pasturella, scabies, and tuberculosis have infected our wildlife.

For almost a century we have been caught in this serious dilemma, which could lead to catastrophic losses in Greater Yellowstone’s renowned big game herds when the added stress of chronic wasting disease inevitably arrives in Teton County.

JIHI provides reason for optimism.

Cooperative management helps transcend boundaries
Since 97 percent of Teton County is public land, there is no better place to implement a new, innovative, cooperative habitat-management plan than here. Supported by representatives of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at the National Elk Refuge, Wyoming Game & Fish Department, Bridger-Teton National Forest, and Grand Teton National Park, JIHI promises a coordinated habitat-management approach on native ungulate winter and spring-fall ranges within the upper Snake River drainage.

According to the JIHI Concept Plan, "the goal of JIHI is to maximize effectiveness of native winter range for ungulates and a diversity of wildlife indigenous to the region through identification of habitat-management opportunities. Emphasis will be placed on enhancing distributions of elk on winter and transitional ranges. The emphasis on elk distribution stems from their current concentrations on and near the feedgrounds and disease issues related to these concentrations."

JIHI mirrors Restoring Wild Patterns
Sound familiar? It is. This far-sighted JIHI plan mirrors WOC’s own Restoring Wild Patterns project as a conservation vision for the future.

WOC needs agency involvement to fulfill its vision for Restoring Wild Patterns. Only the land managers controlling the forests and plains where migrating wildlife roam can ensure there is adequate forage for these animals to sustain them throughout the year, which is critical for achieving Restoring Wild Patterns’ goal of phasing out feedgrounds.

JIHI allows conservationists and agency representatives to pursue habitat-improvement projects, discuss ways to avoid conflicts with private landowners near critical wildlife habitat, and maximize habitat availability along migration corridors regardless of agency and political boundaries. It is a concept driven by the health of our free-ranging ungulates rather than quotas and artificial herd sizes, which makes it a concept WOC enthusiastically supports.

JIHI falls under the umbrella of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department’s Strategic Habitat Plan. This plan will eventually take the habitat-improvement concepts developed by this interagency approach and use them to increase habitat effectiveness in other parts of the state.

WOC optimistic JIHI helps slow the spread of disease
WOC encourages habitat-improvement projects in order to increase forage and cover for wildlife throughout the state. In recent years, controlled burns have done this successfully around northern Jackson Hole, allowing more elk to spend the winter on open range away from feedgrounds there. This in turn has reduced the incidence of disease and increased cow-calf ratios.

Perhaps the best news, given this trend, is that when diseases such as chronic wasting disease (CWD) arrive in Teton County, wildlife will have a better chance of survival if they are spread out. It seems inevitable that CWD will infect western Wyoming’s elk herds soon. But studies conducted in Colorado and other states indicate that free-ranging elk dispersed on native habitat only suffer a four to five percent loss to chronic wasting disease compared to feedground or game-farm elk where more than 60-75 percent losses are documented.

How do you spell success for wildlife habitat and migration corridor sustainability? J-I-H-I.