Keeping the Crown of the Continent Connected - A Report on Highway 2 Near Glacier National Park (Poster)

Abstract

The US Highway 2 corridor separates Glacier National Park from the Bob Marshall Wilderness complex to the south. With increasing vehicle traffic, recreation, and high train traffic, resource managers in the region are concerned that Highway 2 is slowly becoming a barrier to north-south wildlife movement in the Crown of the Continent Ecosystem, and thus, this corridor has been identified as a priority for wildlife connectivity planning. While there have been a number of efforts to understand wildlife connectivity across this corridor, they have tended to be narrowly focused and temporally disjointed. Over the last year, an interagency group of local researchers and managers met in two workshops to evaluate existing research and data sources, identify knowledge gaps, and establish a research framework to increase understanding of wildlife use of the US2 corridor. The long-term goal is to identify explicit management options for preserving trans-highway movements, seasonal migrations, and dispersal movements of animals, plants, and ecological processes. This report builds on previous efforts to understand and plan for terrestrial wildlife connectivity across this inter-jurisdictional corridor by beginning a multi-agency conversation for collaborative research and management.