Elk Occupancy Agreements

field projects

Elk Occupancy Agreement

Flexible conservation tools that pay rent for elk

overview

Elk Occupancy Agreements are voluntary, short-term habitat leases that improve elk tolerance while conserving habitat on private land.

In many cases, a landowner is willing to manage land for conservation but is unwilling to enter a conservation easement, which requires conservation in perpetuity. Elk occupancy agreements provide a promising alternative, and PERC is pioneering their development.

By addressing the costs associated with providing elk habitat, we can help keep these large private landscapes intact and provide valuable winter range for the elk—accomplishing both is our goal.

Challenge

Protecting vital migration corridors

It’s been called the American Serengeti. Encompassing Yellowstone National Park and the mosaic of public wildlands and private property surrounding it, the larger Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is home today to the longest migrations for elk, mule deer, and pronghorn known to exist:

All of Greater Yellowstone’s major wild hooved animals—elk, deer, pronghorn, moose, bison, bighorn sheep, and mountain goats—move as part of their evolutionarily ingrained behavior, part of learning passed down in herds from mothers to young over hundreds of generations.
Like spokes leading to the center of a wheel, at least a dozen different elk herds, comprising tens of thousands of animals, follow the “green wave” of grass in spring onto the Yellowstone Plateau, a high mountainous area in the national park where cow elk raise their calves and put on body weight before leaving when the snow begins to fly. The good nutrition they find along the way is what drives individual animal and herd health, including fecundity. Elk physiology is perfectly timed to be at the right place at the right time, when food is available to propel the animals forward.
Epic wildlife migrations used to exist across most of America, but various kinds of habitat fragmentation have created impassable barriers, causing some of the migrations to die out. The Yellowstone region has corridors of open space through which animals can still pass.

Without creative actions to secure landscape protection, however, these ancient animal movements and the integrity of the corridors they depend on could be lost forever.

In Montana’s Paradise Valley outside Yellowstone National Park, conserving migratory passages and wildlife habitat is of critical importance given the increasing pressure of population growth and development. These pressures threaten the private working lands of the region that provide essential winter range for a variety of wildlife including elk, a keystone species of the region’s ecosystem.

“Just like a pulmonary or circulatory system in the human body, if you have a blocked or clogged artery or obstructed breathing passage, you’re in trouble,” he says. “If these migration routes are going to persist, then protecting the pathways where they happen is essential.”
– Arthur Middleton, Assistant Professor of Wildlife Management and Policy, University of California – Berkeley

Elk Occupancy Agreement #1

In 2021, PERC and the Greater Yellowstone Coalition partnered with a local family ranch in Montana’s Paradise Valley to conserve a nearly 500-acre elk winter range area, separated by approximately 1.25 miles of wildlife-friendly fencing.

All of Greater Yellowstone’s major wild hooved animals—elk, deer, pronghorn, moose, bison, bighorn sheep, and mountain goats—move as part of their evolutionarily ingrained behavior, part of learning passed down in herds from mothers to young over hundreds of generations.
Like spokes leading to the center of a wheel, at least a dozen different elk herds, comprising tens of thousands of animals, follow the “green wave” of grass in spring onto the Yellowstone Plateau, a high mountainous area in the national park where cow elk raise their calves and put on body weight before leaving when the snow begins to fly. The good nutrition they find along the way is what drives individual animal and herd health, including fecundity. Elk physiology is perfectly timed to be at the right place at the right time, when food is available to propel the animals forward.
Epic wildlife migrations used to exist across most of America, but various kinds of habitat fragmentation have created impassable barriers, causing some of the migrations to die out. The Yellowstone region has corridors of open space through which animals can still pass.

project partners

Greater Yellowstone Coalition, a conservation nonprofit dedicated to protecting the lands, waters, and wildlife of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem