Yellowstone to Yukon: Lessons Learned from 20 years of Conservation Efforts

While large landscape conservation as a platform for enabling climate change adaptation has gained widespread currency among many government agencies in this new century, twenty years ago it was at the vanguard of a new way of thinking about biodiversity conservation championed by only a handful of non-profit organizations. The Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative (Y2Y) emerged from this conversation to become one of the first efforts in the world to apply the principles of conservation biology – namely planning at the scale at which target species use the landscape to promote a network of large protected core areas functionally linked by wildlife movement zones – at the scale of western North America.  Over those twenty years, Y2Y has evolved from a loosely structured cooperative venture among a few dozen NGOs to a bi-national organization whose vision for landscape connectivity has inspired hundreds of partners to undertake a variety of policy, land management, and restoration activities that have changed the map of the Yellowstone to Yukon region. From an inspiring but vague concept, Y2Y has developed a suite of conservation actions targeted at priority landscapes and issues aimed at restoring or maintaining core habitats and connectivity within a .5M square mile region. This presentation will review the organizational development of Y2Y and compare the state of conservation in the region at its founding in 1993 to that today.