The bison, which has long served as the symbol of the Department of the Interior, became the official national mammal of the United States in 2016. Bison played a key role in shaping the grasslands of the Great Plains for millennia, but today they are confined to unnaturally small ranges. National parks, including four in the Great Plains, provide a major last bastion for wild bison. Herds in Badlands National Park and Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota, Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve in Kansas, and Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota are wild in that their movements are unconstrained within their park’s designated bison range, they receive no supplemental feed, minerals, or veterinary attention, and social interactions are not constrained.
 
To maintain natural ecosystem conditions for wild bison within these parks, park managers regularly make decisions that affect bison herds, the animal communities they interact with, and the plant communities that support them. Until now, these decisions have focused on individual parks’ bison herds. The National Park Service has set forth a new initiative that strives to increase managers’ consideration of a broader range of issues when making bison management decisions in order to achieve region-wide objectives. This initiative will culminate in the National Park Service Midwest Region Strategic Bison Management Plan.
 
As part of this effort, the initiative’s leadership team identified the need for a tool that evaluates the feasibility of maintaining desired bison health and ecosystem conditions in parks with bison herds under a range of potential management and climate scenarios, and that assesses how short-term management decisions could impact long-term objectives. To address this need, researchers will bring together NPS managers, biologists, and decision-makers, together with USGS and university scientists, to develop specific objectives for the bison management plan and to develop a detailed implementation plan for the production of such a tool. Close manager-scientist collaboration from the onset of the project will ensure a shared understanding of the tool’s function and capabilities. This project will serve as a first step towards the development of innovative future management of bison in national parks.