A wolf on the road in Denali.
National Park Service
A wolf on the road in Denali.

Visitors to national parks are half as likely to see wolves in their natural habitat when wolf hunting is permitted just outside park boundaries.

That’s the main finding of a paper co-authored by the University of Washington appearing April 28 in the journal PLOS ONE. Its authors examined wolf harvest and sightings data from two national parks — Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska and Yellowstone National Park that straddles Wyoming, Montana and Idaho — and found visitors were twice as likely to see a wolf when hunting wasn’t permitted adjacent to the parks.

“This is the first study that demonstrates a potential link between the harvest of wildlife on the borders of a park and the experience that visitors have within the park,” said lead author Bridget Borg, a Denali wildlife biologist who completed this research while earning her doctorate from the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

The researchers, including Laura Prugh, assistant professor in the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, looked at the dynamics between hunting and viewing wolves at these two national parks because they are the only ones where visitors have a good chance of seeing a wolf. Both parks have long-term monitoring programs that have collected years of data on resident wolf populations, including years when wolf harvest was permitted and years when it was prohibited near the borders of both Denali and Yellowstone.

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