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Overview of YERC's Research
YERC has developed a valuable, diverse network consisting of scientists, universities, land management agencies, corporations, private citizens, and the high tech industry. By combining these talents and resources, YERC believes the research generated:
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is more credible, since no one group or agency is generating the study.
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is more cost-effective, since resources and personnel can be shared.
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helps facilitate complex, long-term research, the cost of which would prohibit any one organization or agency from continuing the research.
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results in a highly effective means of disseminating the information between land management agencies, private organizations and the public.
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provides a "cross fertilization" of ecological education between ecosystem stakeholders.
The crafting of successful conservation strategies must include scientific knowledge about the effects human activities cast against a background of natural pattern and process. Conducting this type of research across ecosystems can be difficult. Ecosystems are large and from an experimental research approach, are very difficult to manipulate. As such, we take advantage of both unplanned natural experiments (e.g., great fires of 1988) as well as policy experiments (e.g., wolf reintroduction). In a recent issue of the journal Science (2001: page 1847) renowned ecologist Jared Diamond writes,
"Perhaps the most important message… concerns the virtues of planned [and unplanned] natural experiments… natural experiments create ecological communities that we would never have dreamed of creating, or that laws, moral scruples, or practical obstacles would have prenvented us from creating even if we had dreamed of them."
Whether it's the Yellowstone's threatened grizzly bear populations, the collapse of Pacific Northwest salmon runs or the management of America's forests and wetlands, solutions to major ecological challenges require a paradigm shift in the way we think. For this to happen, we must apply innovative science to decisions about nature. When we do, good things happen.
Science lifted each of these issues—and many others like them—from subjective opinion and polarization, to a place where decisions could be made on the basis of facts. The formula is deceptively simple: Research yields knowledge, and knowledge allows citizens and leaders to make sensible choices.
With this commitment, the scientists at YERC are working to prevent ecological train wrecks from occurring in and around Yellowstone—one of the last places in America to harbor the original set of native carnivores that roamed its lands when the Europeans first arrived. YERC conducts cutting edge research to tackle some of the most difficult questions facing Yellowstone.
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