A year after being added to the federal list, forest managers in Idaho are working to help wolverines survive

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists have launched a new project to better understand wolverine populations and demographics in Idaho’s forests.

A year ago, the North American wolverine was listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, meaning it is federally recognized as a species that is likely to become an endangered species in the foreseeable future throughout all or a significant portion of its range would.

Wolverines live in remote, high-altitude alpine habitats. In winter they rely on the deep snow cover to dig burrows in which to raise their young. There is limited population data on wolverines, but in 2014, US Fish and Wildlife estimated that between 250 and 300 wolverines lived in the lower 48 states.

The Wolverine Monitoring Enhancement Project began in October with scientists installing motion cameras, scent dispensers and hair snare stations in the Boise, Payette and Sawtooth National Forests in Idaho. The goal is to lure wolverines to trees with the scent of roadkill and grab a strand of hair while they investigate the scent. The hair samples are used to analyze the DNA.

The project will run over the next three years and is funded by the US Fish and Wildlife’s Species Recovery Fund.

The Wolverine Monitoring Enhancement Project utilizes data collected in a similar 2010-2015 study that examined the effects of backcountry winter recreation on wolverine populations in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming.

However, this study concluded that they did not have enough information to determine the effects.

This new study aims to gather more information, but at a local level, Kelly Martin, public affairs specialist for the Payette National Forest, told the Idaho Capital Sun.

“We are trying to gather as much information as possible to limit the impact on the species,” she said. “What does that mean? Right now we can’t say, ‘We need to do X, Y, or Z to limit impacts on wolverines,’ because we just don’t know exactly what that would be.”

Wolverines were once found throughout the northern part of the United States, from states like Montana and Idaho to regions as far south as New Mexico in the Rocky Mountains and Southern California in the Sierra Nevada. But after more than a century of unregulated fishing and habitat destruction, wolverines in the Lower 48 are now found only in small populations in Idaho, Montana, Washington, Wyoming and northeastern Oregon.

Conservation groups have been pushing for federal protection of the wolverine for two decades.

In 1995, conservation groups petitioned the federal government to list the species and went through six successful rounds of litigation to secure federal protection.

Under the new protections, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service must develop a wolverine recovery plan, identify critical habitat that will be protected in the future and potentially plan to reintroduce the species to Colorado.