This interactive page was designed as part of a student assignment with the Teton
Science Schools' Graduate Program.
It uses the National Elk Refuge as an example to build an understanding for the
complexity
of wildlife habitat and corridors through interactive puzzles and slideshows.
Learning and recognizing the numerous species that come and go to this area of great
ecological diversity is certainly no easy task,
so Dale Gentry, Research Faculty with the Teton
Science
School, Graduate Program
, started a "bird-of-the-week" email to his graduate students.
This web application simply collected that information and built on it.
About JacksonEffects
Jackson Effects is an archived collection of subjects and links from JacksonEffects.com, a
retired website targeting Jackson Hole's ecosystem and history.
The topics that found a home on this website, although created in 2007, are still
surprisingly relevant. Take the slide-show on Elk in Jackson:
it touches on everything from Elk migration to current-day dilemmas in the wild-life management
of Bison.
Jackson Hole is uniquely located in the middle of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem
that includes Grand Teton
and Yellowstone National Park.
The town is surronded by National Forest,
and borders connecting wildlife corridors like the Wind River Mountain
Range.
It will therefore come as no surprise that Jackson Hole is also a place where the community
constantly
struggles with the trade-offs of human and wildlife co-habitation:
- fourage for cattle and sheep versus native elk and bighorn sheep;
- safety for cattle and humans versus free-roaming wolfs and grizzleys;
- snowmobiling versus skiing versus winter-habitat;
- flood protection for neighborhoods versus flood plains for snow-melt.