Wildlife Management

The National Park Service; the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks; and the Forest Service have formed an interagency team to examine alternatives for managing the bison herds in Yellowstone National Park. The goal is to develop a management plan that would ensure the viability of the park's wild and free-ranging bison herd while at the same time protecting Montana's domestic cattle from contracting brucellosis--a disease that can cause cattle to abort during pregnancy. Because some Yellowstone bison are infected with brucellosis, ranchers and public officials in Montana fear that the bison will transmit the disease to domestic cattle. This report provides information on the various alternatives for the long-term management of the Yellowstone bison.

GAO noted that:(1) the proposed plans for managing the Yellowstone bison all have same the basic purpose, which is to maintain a wild, free-ranging population while protecting Montana's cattle from brucellosis infection; (2) however, the specific objectives and management actions identified to achieve that purpose differ significantly among the plans; (3) of the six different bison management plans GAO reviewed, only the interagency team's draft EIS included an analysis of the net benefits associated with its seven bison management alternatives; (4) consequently, GAO was unable to compare the potential economic effects of the plans; (5) moreover, the scope of the interagency team's analysis of the benefits and costs is limited, and some of the data used in the analysis is subject to considerable uncertainty; (6) because of time constraints, the interagency team's contractor used data on other wildlife species to approximate the bison-related benefits; (7) the interagency team stated that it plans to improve the precision of the benefit estimates in the final EIS by using bison-specific data that is being collected; (8) approximately 70 percent of the public comments received by the interagency team opposed the preferred alternative presented in the draft EIS; (9) on the basis of the public comments and the findings of additional research completed after the draft statement's issuance, the interagency team is considering modifying the preferred alternative for the final EIS; (10) on November 5, 1999, the federal lead agencies sent the latest proposal for modifying the preferred alternative to Montana for its review; and (11) according to Department of the Interior staff, the proposal would rely on the vaccination of both bison and cattle, as well as their separation, to minimize the risk of brucellosis transmission.