Anticipating the impacts of the Social, Political, and Biophysical Landscape on Long-Term Connectivity for Reintroduced Plains Bison

Intense anthropogenic pressures on the natural environment have created the need for implementing strategies that promote or restore habitat connectivity. The ability for animals to move between habitat patches allows animals to find mates, access resources, and shift their range in response to the changing climate and ensures that ecological and evolutionary processes persist. Connectivity conservation typically focuses on biophysical barriers to animal movement, but for many species reintroductions, establishing and maintaining connectivity often requires overcoming both ecological and socio-political barriers. Despite the need to navigate complex socio-political landscapes to implement connectivity conservation plans, datasets depicting those conditions are rarely used in the connectivity models that underlie connectivity conservation plans. In this research, I demonstrate an approach for leveraging social, political, institutional, and ecological datasets to model long-term connectivity for reintroduced Plains bison (Bison bison) in part of the Northern Great Plains, where no habitat connectivity currently exists. Efforts to reintroduce bison, both for cultural and ecological reasons, have been ongoing since their near extirpation in the late 1800s due to colonial forces. There are currently more than 20 international, federal, non-profit, and Tribally-led efforts to reintroduce bison to parts of Plains bison expansive historic range. These reintroduction efforts have occasionally been met with intense socio-political backlash highlighting the need for conservation interventions that address important socio-political obstacles in order to achieve long-term connectivity. Some of the socio-political barriers that practitioners seeking to restore bison face are a lack of social acceptance, political opposition from the Republican party and cattle ranching industry, and the need to navigate complex jurisdictional boundaries across a large landscape. I analyzed the impacts of these specific barriers by using responses from an international wildlife governance preference survey, republican voting trends, cattle sales, and parcel density as a measure of jurisdictional complexity. I integrated these datasets with spatial surfaces depicting bison habitat suitability and human modification to develop a suite of resistance surfaces that depict both the challenges of a bison moving through the landscape and the challenges of conserving important movement pathways for the species. I used these resistance surfaces to compare the costs and probabilities for implementing a variety of connectivity conservation plans. My results highlight where social-ecological mismatches and fit occur throughout the landscape. The analysis shows that the most ecologically ideal pathway is also socio-politically costly, and that choosing a slightly less ecologically valuable pathway may cost less in terms of socio-political resistance. I also analyzed the potential spatial footprints of three commonly used interventions for promoting conservation outcomes by manipulating the socio-political resistance to reflect three hypothetical conservation interventions using the wildlife governance preference survey. I explored the interventions of creating public land tolerance zones (e.g., shift in jurisdictional complexity), economic incentives aimed at promoting social acceptance, and a Tribal and First Nations governance intervention given the cultural importance of bison to Indigenous people in North America. I found that the economic incentive did little to shift the probability of implementing a connectivity plan for bison when compared to the public land tolerance zone and Tribal and First Nations governance scenario, suggesting that those strategies may have a greater impact on bison’s long-term connectivity in the region. This approach can help conservation managers make more informed decisions regarding where to implement bison connectivity plans, as well as what levers may lead more successful conservation outcomes. My approach could be applied in research for other wide-ranging, reintroduced, or otherwise controversial species to characterize the potential trade-offs involved with different conservation interventions and ultimately lead to conservation plans that have a higher probability of successful implementation

Buffalo Reading List

This reading list gathers together literature focused on buffalo (also known as bison) to support ongoing efforts to restore this iconic species to its keystone cultural and ecological role. The books and articles compiled here are grounded in a wide range of academic disciplines and approaches, representing many distinct ways of thinking about buffalo within the realm of Western sciences. This is not intended to be an exhaustive account of what is known about buffalo, much of which is held in Indigenous knowledge systems and communities. This academic list is designed as a resource for those working towards buffalo restoration, including conservation practitioners, researchers, parks and government officials, and Tribal communities. It is divided into categories according to either discipline or thematic focus, each containing a subset of pertinent literature. Topics include the paleobiology of bison, histories of buffalo loss, relationships between Indigenous Peoples and buffalo, buffalo restoration and reintroduction, buffalo ecology, buffalo and climate change, governance and human dimensions of buffalo, bison and cattle, bison as livestock, and the genetics of bison. This list is intended as a living document to grow with the increasingly rich scholarship on buffalo, and will be updated regularly

The Effects of Host Plant Resistance on Potato Leafhopper, Pea Aphid and Predatory Insects in Alfalfa

Alfalfa, Medicago sativa, is one of the most important forage crops in the world. The potato leafhopper, Empoasca fabae, is the primary pest of alfalfa in Northeast USA. A secondary pest of alfalfa is the pea aphid, Acyrthosiphon pisum. Farmers traditionally use chemical insecticides to manage pests of alfalfa. However, insecticides can be detrimental to environmental and human health. Therefore, finding ways to reduce insecticide use through alternative pest management strategies is an important aspect of agricultural ecology. One alternative pest management strategy is host plant resistance, which involves the genetic manipulation of a plant to make it less desirable to pests. Alfalfa has been bred to have glandular-trichomes, which may cause it to be partially resistant to the potato leafhopper. I examined the effects of leafhopper-resistant alfalfa on the potato leafhopper, pea aphid, and predatory insects. In an open-field experiment, leafhopper-resistant alfalfa resulted in a reduction in leafhopper intensity, an increase in pea aphid intensity, and had mixed effects on predatory insects. I conducted a microcosm experiment to explore the possible mechanisms by which aphid intensity increases in leafhopper-resistant alfalfa. The results suggested that the higher aphid-intensity in the leafhopper-resistant alfalfa is caused, at least in part, by a competitive release from the primary leafhopper pests. Thus, leafhopper-resistant alfalfa appears to be an effective way to control the potato leafhopper, but control of the primary leafhopper pest may release pea aphids from competition and promote outbreaks of this secondary pest