The Yellowstone to Yukon (Y2Y) region stretches over the northern Rocky Mountains across portions of four U.S. states and four Canadian provinces and territories, covering approximately three times the geographical extent of California. Home to a number of conservation "firsts" including the world's first national park (Yellowstone in 1872), Canada's first national park (Banff in 1882), the U.S.'s first national forest (Yellowstone Park Timberland Reserve, now the Shoshone, in 1891), and the world's first international peace park (Waterton-Glacier in 1932), the Y2Y region today encompasses an estimated 700 protected areas. By the 1990s, when the Y2Y vision was first conceived, no few conservationists and scientists long been raising concern that such "core" protected areas were becoming isolated islands of biodiversity. The advent of Y2Y provided an iconic banner under which scientists and conservationists could articulate those concerns, and over the ensuing years they established both a virtual network and a regional organization for sustaining landscape connectivity. During these early years, the need for genetic connectivity was central to the argument for working at the scale of Y2Y, and thus conservationists targeted their efforts on direct threats to connectivity with a focus on habitat loss, habitat fragmentation, invasive species, and hunting of endangered species. Although climate change was acknowledged as a threat, it was generally not perceived as immediate or pressing.
Results/Conclusions
Over the past decade, the threat of climate change has received increasing attention largely due to an array of indicators, including increasing average temperatures, earlier spring thaws, declining snow packs, receding of mountain glaciers, and decreased stream flows. This has renewed the focus on connectivity, but with an emphasis on the capacity of species to adapt to changing environmental conditions by moving across latitudinal, altitudinal, and other gradients. Most importantly, conservationists are focusing on the Y2Y region's high capacity for climate change adaptation due to its vast scale, relative intactness, still-functional ecosystems, high levels of ecological representation and redundancy, strong potential for the establishment of climate refugia, and its high degree of extant landscape connectivity. In a future that likely entails highly unpredictable landscape changes, Y2Y and its partners are examining, promoting, and implementing adaptive conservation strategies, while at the same time maintaining efforts to protect lands of high conservation value through traditional land management approaches
