National parks endure today as a rare covenant between landscape and people. They are vast landscapes held in trust for the benefit of all, where nature is largely allowed to exist on its own terms. They safeguard not only the raw beauty and biodiversity of the country’s most precious places, but also a deeper inheritance of culture, history, and natural refuge. In an increasingly human-dominated world, these wild expanses are more essential than ever before, anchoring us to something older and profoundly necessary to the human experience.
Within these protected boundaries lie some of the most outstanding expressions of the American landscape—geologic wonders, expansive viewsheds, charismatic wildlife big and small, archeological sites, and ecosystems that exist nowhere else, held intact against the pressures of time and human development. In their preservation, the parks become unique living laboratories that invite undistorted study, observation, and revelation. It is here, in these more intact systems, that we can come closer to understanding the natural world around us.
The scientific work unfolding across Yellowstone National Park continues to reveal a world far more intricate than previously understood. Three recent projects reflect the breadth of that inquiry:
National parks endure today as a rare covenant between landscape and people. They are vast landscapes held in trust for the benefit of all, where nature is largely allowed to exist on its own terms. They safeguard not only the raw beauty and biodiversity of the country’s most precious places, but also a deeper inheritance of culture, history, and natural refuge. In an increasingly human-dominated world, these wild expanses are more essential than ever before, anchoring us to something older and profoundly necessary to the human experience.
Within these protected boundaries lie some of the most outstanding expressions of the American landscape—geologic wonders, expansive viewsheds, charismatic wildlife big and small, archeological sites, and ecosystems that exist nowhere else, held intact against the pressures of time and human development. In their preservation, the parks become unique living laboratories that invite undistorted study, observation, and revelation. It is here, in these more intact systems, that we can come closer to understanding the natural world around us.
The scientific work unfolding across Yellowstone National Park continues to reveal a world far more intricate than previously understood. Three recent projects reflect the breadth of that inquiry:
Raven GPS
New findings have upended a long-held assumption about one of the park’s most iconic relationships between wolves and ravens, which are locally known as “wolf birds” because of their close association with wolves. Rather than simply trailing wolves, ravens are now understood to carry sophisticated mental maps of the landscape, using prior experience to identify areas where predators are most likely to kill prey, and sometimes flying for hours or across vast distances to reach them. To uncover this, researchers undertook the formidable task of trapping and outfitting 69 ravens with lightweight GPS “backpacks”—a process made especially difficult by the birds’ acute intelligence and wariness. The project reveals a remarkable form of spatial reasoning in the wild, with ravens navigating by the patterns wolves imprint on the land.
Howlin’ Wolves
Across Yellowstone, a new kind of listening is underway—one that treats the landscape itself as a living archive of sound. Through an expansive network of bioacoustic recorders, researchers are capturing the park’s soundscape and assembling the largest library of wild wolf vocalizations ever created. Within it, the howl begins to separate into more nuanced meaning: whines signaling intimacy or tension, growls marking threat, and layered chorus howls carrying messages of identity, territory, and connection across miles of open terrain. What emerges is a sense of language—a system of expression that, once decoded, reveals wolves as social beings communicating within a structure far more complex than we had ever imagined.
Cultural Geography
A different form of research is helping Yellowstone recover dimensions of the landscape that conventional maps and written archives have too often obscured. Through the Yellowstone Tribal Oral Histories Project, Yellowstone Forever and the National Park Service are working with the 27 Tribal Nations associated with the park to document the knowledge and memories of Tribal elders and cultural leaders. Guided by consultation, cultural protocols, and the authority of the participating Tribes, these histories may illuminate the names, journeys, practices, and relationships through which Yellowstone has been known across generations. By preserving these accounts and allowing them to inform future exhibits and digital interpretation, the project can help create a more complete understanding of Yellowstone, foregrounding it as a place long known, inhabited, and shaped—and one to which Indigenous peoples maintain deep, living connections.
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With long-standing funding challenges for the national parks, nonprofit partners like Yellowstone Forever—the official nonprofit partner of Yellowstone National Park—play a vital role in advancing scientific research and conservation in Yellowstone National Park through fundraising efforts that make such work possible. JMM has long-supported research initiatives such as the Yellowstone Wolf Project, partnering with Yellowstone Forever to enable unique long-term explorations of a landscape and the many relationships that define it.
WRITTEN BY JMM
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