Wolf, Canis lupus, Den Site Selection in the Rocky Mountains

Because mortality of Wolves, Canis lupus, is highest during the first six months of life, den site selection may affect reproductive success of Wolf populations. We studied fine-scale denning habitat selection (within 100 m of den site) by comparing field-measured characteristics of 22 dens in Idaho, Montana, and Alberta with 22 paired random contrast locations within pack home ranges. In order of importance, Wolves denned in areas with greater canopy cover, hiding cover, herbaceous ground cover, and woody debris, and were closer to water than paired random sites. Thus Wolves may select den sites for physical protection and available water. We also studied coarse-scale denning habitat selection by comparing 35 Wolf dens with 35 paired contrast locations in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming with respect to six remotely-sensed variables (elevation, slope, coniferous forest cover, solar radiation, distance to water, and distance to roads). Although these variables did not differ (univariate P > 0.10) between den and contrast locations, a Mahalanobis-distance model using four remotely-sensed variables (slope, elevation, coniferous forest cover, and solar radiation) suggested > 85% of dens would occur in potential denning habitat occupying < 12% of the Wolf recovery areas in the northern Rocky Mountains. This model may be useful for identifying likely den locations in areas not yet occupied by Wolves. Wolf core use areas, including den areas, showed higher intensity of use throughout the year when compared to the entire territory

Wolf Management In The Northwestern United States

Gray wolves (Canis lupus) were deliberately eliminated from the northern Rocky Mountains (NRM) by 1930. Restoration began in 1986. There are currently nearly 120 breeding pair and 1800 wolves. Wolf restoration initially proceeded with more benefits and fewer problems than predicted. However, conflicts have steadily increased since 2002 when the population first met its minimum recovery goal. About 40 million has been spent since 1974 and the management program currently costs >4 million/yr. Wolves were delisted in 2008 and 2009 but relisted by federal court order in 2009 and 2010. While the NRM wolf population is biologically recovered, public opinion remains divisive and the legal, political, and policy decisions will continue to be litigated by a diversity of interests. Science is a poor tool to resolve the differing human values that continue to be debated with great passion through wolf symbolism

State of the climate in 2018

In 2018, the dominant greenhouse gases released into Earth’s atmosphere—carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide—continued their increase. The annual global average carbon dioxide concentration at Earth’s surface was 407.4 ± 0.1 ppm, the highest in the modern instrumental record and in ice core records dating back 800 000 years. Combined, greenhouse gases and several halogenated gases contribute just over 3 W m−2 to radiative forcing and represent a nearly 43% increase since 1990. Carbon dioxide is responsible for about 65% of this radiative forcing. With a weak La Niña in early 2018 transitioning to a weak El Niño by the year’s end, the global surface (land and ocean) temperature was the fourth highest on record, with only 2015 through 2017 being warmer. Several European countries reported record high annual temperatures. There were also more high, and fewer low, temperature extremes than in nearly all of the 68-year extremes record. Madagascar recorded a record daily temperature of 40.5°C in Morondava in March, while South Korea set its record high of 41.0°C in August in Hongcheon. Nawabshah, Pakistan, recorded its highest temperature of 50.2°C, which may be a new daily world record for April. Globally, the annual lower troposphere temperature was third to seventh highest, depending on the dataset analyzed. The lower stratospheric temperature was approximately fifth lowest. The 2018 Arctic land surface temperature was 1.2°C above the 1981–2010 average, tying for third highest in the 118-year record, following 2016 and 2017. June’s Arctic snow cover extent was almost half of what it was 35 years ago. Across Greenland, however, regional summer temperatures were generally below or near average. Additionally, a satellite survey of 47 glaciers in Greenland indicated a net increase in area for the first time since records began in 1999. Increasing permafrost temperatures were reported at most observation sites in the Arctic, with the overall increase of 0.1°–0.2°C between 2017 and 2018 being comparable to the highest rate of warming ever observed in the region. On 17 March, Arctic sea ice extent marked the second smallest annual maximum in the 38-year record, larger than only 2017. The minimum extent in 2018 was reached on 19 September and again on 23 September, tying 2008 and 2010 for the sixth lowest extent on record. The 23 September date tied 1997 as the latest sea ice minimum date on record. First-year ice now dominates the ice cover, comprising 77% of the March 2018 ice pack compared to 55% during the 1980s. Because thinner, younger ice is more vulnerable to melting out in summer, this shift in sea ice age has contributed to the decreasing trend in minimum ice extent. Regionally, Bering Sea ice extent was at record lows for almost the entire 2017/18 ice season. For the Antarctic continent as a whole, 2018 was warmer than average. On the highest points of the Antarctic Plateau, the automatic weather station Relay (74°S) broke or tied six monthly temperature records throughout the year, with August breaking its record by nearly 8°C. However, cool conditions in the western Bellingshausen Sea and Amundsen Sea sector contributed to a low melt season overall for 2017/18. High SSTs contributed to low summer sea ice extent in the Ross and Weddell Seas in 2018, underpinning the second lowest Antarctic summer minimum sea ice extent on record. Despite conducive conditions for its formation, the ozone hole at its maximum extent in September was near the 2000–18 mean, likely due to an ongoing slow decline in stratospheric chlorine monoxide concentration. Across the oceans, globally averaged SST decreased slightly since the record El Niño year of 2016 but was still far above the climatological mean. On average, SST is increasing at a rate of 0.10° ± 0.01°C decade−1 since 1950. The warming appeared largest in the tropical Indian Ocean and smallest in the North Pacific. The deeper ocean continues to warm year after year. For the seventh consecutive year, global annual mean sea level became the highest in the 26-year record, rising to 81 mm above the 1993 average. As anticipated in a warming climate, the hydrological cycle over the ocean is accelerating: dry regions are becoming drier and wet regions rainier. Closer to the equator, 95 named tropical storms were observed during 2018, well above the 1981–2010 average of 82. Eleven tropical cyclones reached Saffir–Simpson scale Category 5 intensity. North Atlantic Major Hurricane Michael’s landfall intensity of 140 kt was the fourth strongest for any continental U.S. hurricane landfall in the 168-year record. Michael caused more than 30 fatalities and $25 billion (U.S. dollars) in damages. In the western North Pacific, Super Typhoon Mangkhut led to 160 fatalities and$6 billion (U.S. dollars) in damages across the Philippines, Hong Kong, Macau, mainland China, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands. Tropical Storm Son-Tinh was responsible for 170 fatalities in Vietnam and Laos. Nearly all the islands of Micronesia experienced at least moderate impacts from various tropical cyclones. Across land, many areas around the globe received copious precipitation, notable at different time scales. Rodrigues and Réunion Island near southern Africa each reported their third wettest year on record. In Hawaii, 1262 mm precipitation at Waipā Gardens (Kauai) on 14–15 April set a new U.S. record for 24-h precipitation. In Brazil, the city of Belo Horizonte received nearly 75 mm of rain in just 20 minutes, nearly half its monthly average. Globally, fire activity during 2018 was the lowest since the start of the record in 1997, with a combined burned area of about 500 million hectares. This reinforced the long-term downward trend in fire emissions driven by changes in land use in frequently burning savannas. However, wildfires burned 3.5 million hectares across the United States, well above the 2000–10 average of 2.7 million hectares. Combined, U.S. wildfire damages for the 2017 and 2018 wildfire seasons exceeded $40 billion (U.S. dollars)

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Restoration and Management of Gray Wolves in Central Idaho - Progress Report 2003

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) is restoring endangered gray wolves to the northern Rocky Mountains including ongoing efforts in 3 restoration areas: Northwest Montana, the Greater Yellowstone Area, and Central Idaho. Gray wolves naturally recolonized northwest Montana and were down-listed to threatened status under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) in 2003. Nonessential experimental population areas were established for the Greater Yellowstone and Central Idaho Areas where wolves were actively reintroduced under the ESA. This special designation allows for management flexibility to address public concerns such as wolf-livestock conflicts. In 2003 the USFWS reclassified gray wolves across the lower 48 states to better reflect the species current population status. The USFWS changed the classification of the gray wolf under the ESA from endangered to threatened in those portions of historic wolf range except for the Mexican gray wolf, Central Idaho, and Greater Yellowstone Experimental Population Areas. Wolves outside of historic range within the continental United States were delisted and no longer afforded protections under the ESA. At the end of 2003, the Central Idaho Experimental Population Area (CIEPA), was home to an estimated 379 wolves including 38 known wolf packs. Thirty-one of those produced litters, 26 of which met the recovery requirement for a breeding pair - an adult male and an adult female wolf that have successfully raised at least 2 pups to December 31 of their birth year. The population recovery goal for the Northern Rocky Mountain Recovery Region (NRMRR) - to maintain 30 breeding pairs of wolves equitably distributed across the 3 restoration areas for 3 years - was achieved at the end of 2002. Wolves were well distributed across 28,473 square miles (73,746 square km) of the Idaho portion of the CIEPA at the end of 2003. Territories of all known packs and pairs were completely or predominately within National Forest lands, 13 of which included federally designated wilderness areas. Eleven new breeding pairs were documented in 2003 and a minimum of 103 wolf pups was produced. Five packs, first documented in 2003, were retroactively counted as 2002 breeding pairs based on pack size and presence of subadult wolves. Estimated minimum average litter size for all packs that reproduced, including those where counts were suspected incomplete, was 3.3 pups per litter for 2003. Documented wolf mortalities during 2003 decreased from the previous year. Of 15 wolf mortalities with known cause, all (100%) were human-related. There were 2 deaths of undetermined causes and 1 suspected mortality. The fates of 9 radio-collared Idaho wolves that dispersed within the NRMRR were documented during 2003. Undoubtedly, additional wolves without radio-collars dispersed as well. Tracking the movements of dispersing wolves between recovery areas lends credence to the notion that the NRMRR is a single, interconnected metapopulation. Capturing and radio-collaring wolves remained a priority. During 2003, 46 individual wolves were captured, which resulted in the deployment of 33 new radio-collars and the re-collaring of eight individuals. Although wolves are captured and collared every year, the proportion of radio-collared individuals in the population decreases with expanding numbers of wolves, increasing the challenge of monitoring the activities, distribution, and status of the wolf population. Confirmed and probable wolf-caused livestock losses during the year amounted to 23 cattle and 144 sheep. In addition, 6 dogs were confirmed killed by wolves, while 1 additional dog was categorized as a probable wolf kill. As a result of agency control actions, 6 wolves were lethally controlled and 6 were radio-collared and released on site through agency control. One wolf was legally shot by a livestock producer. Scientific information collected through peer-reviewed research will foster a better understanding of wolf ecology and the effects of wolves within the ecosystems they inhabit, leading to effective wolf conservation and management. The Idaho Wolf Recovery Program (Recovery Program) continued to initiate and support ongoing research

Wolf Recovery Project Folder

181 pages of subject files containing and related to Wolf Recovery Projec

Gray Wolf Restoration in the Northwestern United States

Gray wolf (Canis lupus) populations were eliminated from Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, as well as adjacent southwestern Canada by the 1930s. After human-caused mortality of wolves in southwestern Canada began to be regulated in the 1960s, populations began expanding southward. Dispersing individuals occasionally reached the northern Rocky Mountains of the United States, but lacked legal protection there until 1974, after passage of the Endangered Species Act of 1973. In 1986, wolves from Canada successfully raised a litter of pups in Glacier National Park, Montana, and a small population was soon established. In 1995 and 1996, wolves from western Canada were reintroduced to remote public lands in central Idaho and Yellowstone National Park. These wolves were designated as nonessential experimental populations to increase management flexibility and address local and state concerns. Wolf restoration is rapidly occurring in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, and there were at least 28 breeding pairs in December 2000. There are now about 63 adult wolves in northwestern Montana, 192 in central Idaho, and 177 in the Greater Yellowstone area. Dispersal of wolves between Canada, Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming has been documented. Occasional lone wolves may disperse into adjacent states, but population establishment outside of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming is probably not imminent. The gray wolf population in the northwestern U.S. should be recovered and, depending on the completion of state and tribal wolf conservation plans, could be proposed to be removed from Act protection within three years. Wolf restoration has proceeded more quickly and with more benefits, such as public viewing than predicted. Problems, including confirmed livestock depredations, have been lower than estimated. The Service led interagency recovery program focuses its efforts on achieving wolf recovery while addressing the concerns of people who live near wolves. Wolves have restored an important ecological process to several large wild areas in the northern Rocky Mountains of the U.S. The program has been widely publicized and is generally viewed as highly successful

Non-Lethal and Lethal Tools to Manage Wolf-Livestock Conflict in the Northwestern United States

Gray wolf populations were eliminated from the northern Rocky Mountains of the western United States by 1930, largely because of conflicts with livestock. The wolf population is now biologically recovered and over 1,020 wolves are being managed in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming under the federal Endangered Species Act. From 1987 to December 2005, 528 cattle, 1,318 sheep, 83 dogs, 12 goats, 9 llamas, and 6 horses were confirmed killed by wolves, and over $550,000 was paid from a private damage compensation fund. To help restore the wolf population, we used 22 variations of non-lethal control tools, relocated wolves 117 times, and killed 396 wolves to reduce conflict between wolves and livestock. A variety of tools, including regulations that empower the local public to protect their private property, reduced the probability of wolf-caused damage. This wolf population was restored, the risk of livestock damage reduced, and public tolerance of wolves improved through an integrated program of proactive and reactive non-lethal and lethal control tools. Reduced conflict increases the potential to restore wolf populations