Fence inventory along the Absaroka Front
Need and opportunity
The Absaroka Front supports some of the longest migrations of elk, deer, and other hoofed mammals in the world. However, thousands of miles of fences crisscross the area, making it harder for animals to move across the landscape and sometimes even causing death when animals become entangled in loose wires.
Most of these fences have never been mapped, and those that have been mapped rarely include information like wire height or fence condition. This lack of information makes it hard for management agencies and conservation groups to modify fences to be wildlife friendly, and to remove fences that are no longer needed, to benefit wildlife and support range management.
Where we are
Our team worked with partners across the Absaroka Front to consolidate all the existing fence data across the region into a single publicly available database. We then developed an app that all local managers and conservationists could use to improve and modify the database by mapping fences on their phones or tablets. We wrote a detailed user guide and provided in-person training to ensure all our local partners, and their colleagues, could easily gather fence data themselves.
Additionally, we hired a team of field technicians to inventory fences in the two highest-priority mapping areas identified by our partners: the Basin grazing allotment in the Sunlight Basin area, and the Oregon Basin and Y U Bench areas southeast of Cody. These areas provide important winter range, birthing areas, and migration corridors for elk, deer, and pronghorn antelope. We completed our field season at the end of August 2024 with more than 100 miles of fences mapped and measured (including wire heights, fence conditions, locations of all braces and gates, and urgency of fence removal or modification where appropriate) and more than 30 miles of fences that did not exist deleted from the database. We are currently cleaning and summarizing the data collected during the summer field season to share with our partners and interested stakeholders.
Where we’re going
Pending funding and other logistics, we plan to continue our intensive fence inventory efforts in future summers.
The data from this project will be used for at least three purposes. First, and most directly, the information will help the USFS, BLM, and AFI plan and prioritize fence modification and removal work in critical wildlife habitats. Second, our group will combine these fence data with animal movement data to quantify the effects of fences and fence modifications on wildlife movement. Third, we are sharing our data with colleagues at Microsoft AI for Good to help train a computer algorithm to try to detect fences from satellite images.
Team members
Kristin Barker
Kristin serves as the research coordinator for the Beyond Yellowstone Living Lab. Her research primarily focuses on migration ecology, predator-prey dynamics, and anthropogenic influences on animal behavior. She’s spent most of the last two decades living and working in the Rocky Mountains, hiking, camping, biking, skiing, paddling, hunting, and doing lots of fieldwork.
Jerod Merkle
Jerod is an assistant professor and the Knobloch professor of migration ecology and conservation at University of Wyoming. Jerod’s research program is twofold. He and his team study the intricacies of the movement and migration of big game, and develop data products and tools to facilitate their conservation and management.
Tony Mong
Tony is the Wyoming Game and Fish Department’s wildlife biologist in Cody, Wyoming. Much of his work focused on managing and monitoring big game and other wildlife across the region. Tony grew up hunting, fishing, and studying wildlife in Missouri before moving to Wyoming in 2010.
