Why focus on the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem?
With Yellowstone National Park as its core, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) is a 20 million acre expanse of mountainous wildlands in a complex matrix of public and private lands spread over three states. The GYE is the only remaining large biologically intact temperate ecosystem in North America, comparable in geographic scale, biological integrity, and International renown to the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem in Africa. • Like no other part of the planet, the GYE provides critical clues to the origin, current complexity, and future of life on earth, and, indeed, about the possibilities for life elsewhere in the universe. • As the origin of three great river systems – the Colorado, the Missouri, and the Columbia – as the most intact biological template of PreColumbian America – as the greatest area of geothermal activity in the world – and as the world’s first protected wildlands, and thus the first social experiment intending an integration of modern humans with wildlands with the
