Rewilding the ”Wild West”: Restoring Bison Populations in the American Prairie

Authors

Ana Christina Diaz, St. Mary's

Files

Digital Publisher

Digital Commons at St. Mary's University

Publication Date

Spring 2025

Keywords

environmental; American bison; bison; North America

Description

Historically, North America was home to a biodiverse and environmentally rich land, from beavers, mountain lions, numerous bird and insect species, and North America’s largest land mammal, the bison (Figure 1). The American bison (Bison bison), also referred to as buffalo, are a keystone species in their environments, meaning their absence can have detrimental effects on other species. Bison are environmental engineers that create a “mosaic of habitats” with their behaviors including wallowing, grazing, and defecating (American Prairie Foundation 2024). Bison once roamed from Canada to Mexico with a population estimated around 50 million but were tragically almost wiped to extinction, with just a few hundreds remaining in Western rangelands (Schneider 2023). This genocide of buffalo was driven by American settler colonialism with the U.S. government endorsing buffalo hunting as a means to decimate Indigenous American populations, since bison are intertwined into Native American culture and hold a highly significant kinship to tribes (Schneider 2023). While an unsavory piece of American history, it is crucial to understand the importance of restoring bison populations (Figure 2). A more radical form of ecological restoration that is making its way to the forefront of environmental policy is “rewilding” – a term used to describe a more hands off approach to conservation by restoring the ecological functions of a habitat and then letting nature figuratively take the wheel. Although this term was coined in the 1990s, it is now becoming a subject of interest thanks to multiple rewilding projects occurring across Europe, including the restoration of European bison (Jepson and Blythe 2022). To restore bison to their habitats as ecological engineers, I believe rewilding principles should be incorporated into their conservation; this project focuses on current bison conservation efforts in North America, and how they can be improved.

Format

pdf

Size

1 page

City

San Antonio, Texas

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.