The Trump administration plans to cut wide swaths of ecological research conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey, which will end or seriously curtail decades of cutting-edge research as well as ongoing work to track the state of migratory birds, game, and endangered and threatened species.
“The elimination of funding for the USGS Ecosystems Mission Area will be a generational catastrophe for North American—and global—conservation science and management,” said John Organ, a retired chief of the U.S. Geological Survey’s (USGS) Cooperative Research Units (CRU) Program and former TWS president and 2020 Aldo Leopold Memorial Award recipient.
“It’s not going to be replaced; it’s not going to be replicated somewhere else—it’s going to be gone,” said TWS member Chris Servheen, who worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for 35 years in conjunction with the USGS.
An email obtained by Science revealed that as part of its ongoing efforts to reduce government spending, the Trump administration is planning to cut USGS programs. One of these programs is the Ecosystems Mission Area—a wide-reaching section that includes things like the CRUs, Science Centers such as those in Patuxent and Northern Prairies, the Environmental Health Program, the Climate Adaptation Science Centers, and the Biological Threats and Invasive Species Research Program.
The USGS did not respond to a request for comment on any planned cuts and their potential consequences for wildlife.
The goals of these programs are wide-reaching, including science and on-the-ground wildlife managers working on conserving species as well as controlling invasive species that threaten our native ecosystems, agriculture and other important parts of the U.S. economy.
“This erases a program with a legacy going back nearly 150 years to the Division of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy created in 1881 and headed by C. Hart Merriam, whose work led to the discovery and characterization of the mammal and bird fauna of this nation,” Organ said.
Yellowstone grizzly research and management on the block
The Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team (IGBST) is already experiencing a loss in leadership due to retirements and is now facing a permanent cut.
This team focuses on grizzly bears (Ursus arctos horribilis) in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho—a population listed as threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. The collaboration includes scientists from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), state fish and wildlife agencies and Tribal wildlife professionals. USGS scientists lead the IGBST, compiling information like population data from the various agencies involved, producing an integrated population model, and monitoring threats to the animals and their food sources.
“The paid USGS folks are the core of the team,” said Servheen, who worked most of his career in conjunction with the USGS and IGBST before retiring.
Two of the leaders of this team have retired—representing roughly a third of the USGS team—and given the current political climate, they likely won’t be replaced, Servheen said. On top of this, the team sits under the Ecosystems Mission Area, which the administration is reportedly looking to cut altogether.
“There’s a level of uncertainty that is huge right now,” said Servheen, who is now the co-chair of the North American bears section of the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
Terminating this program would be terrible for the ongoing management of the large predators in the Yellowstone area, Servheen said. “If you want grizzly bears around in the future, you don’t eliminate the science that provides data on their population state,” he said.
Killing the program—in part or in its entirety—may also jeopardize the efforts states in the region have made to delist the population, he said. If scientists stop tracking the size of the population, it will be difficult to say whether its numbers are increasing or decreasing. “If you don’t know that stuff, then you start driving with your eyes closed,” Servheen said.
Generational knowledge
USGS program terminations will also eliminate cutting-edge science that underpins the way the U.S. manages all wildlife.
Counting wildlife to understand the health of populations may seem simple, and estimating numbers of some species is easier than others. But what happens when species are cryptic or on the move? How do you get an accurate count of tens of thousands of caribou (Rangifer tarandus) or the number of rufa red knots (Calidris canutus rufa) that pass through the Delaware Bay on their way from South America to Canada on their annual migration, for example?
For the last half century, USGS scientists have been on the cutting edge of developing models to account for levels of uncertainty when estimating population numbers, said TWS member James Nichols, the 2015 Aldo Leopold Memorial Award recipient and a retired senior scientist who worked most of his career developing models like this with the USGS.
“The evolution of [population modeling] has been just incredibly rapid,” Nichols said.
This kind of science supports nearly everything in the wildlife realms, he said. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service relies on accurate modeling estimates like these when making decisions on whether to list, remove or downlist species under the U.S. Endangered Species Act.
Accurate estimates of listed species are critical for settling lawsuits between private companies, conservation organizations or federal and state governments. Without solid numbers, everyone is just guessing and pointing fingers. “This addition of quantitative decisions became pretty important in a lot of those,” Nichols said.
Population estimates are also critical for agencies in managing game populations—essentially determining how many ducks or elk hunters can harvest in a given area during a given season, for example. Without accurate counts, hunting can become unsustainable for some species.
As the science agency within the U.S. Department of the Interior, helping agencies like the USFWS, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service make wise management decisions about the lands and resources they administer is the primary role of USGS scientists, Nichols said.
Losing USGS scientists that develop these kinds of models will slow down the honing of this kind of science. It could also create a generational gap between older scientists with decades of knowledge about it—some of whom are taking government buyouts—and younger scientists, many of whom have lost their jobs already, or soon could, due to the administration’s cuts.
“I absolutely think it will have an impact on learning new stuff and the ability to disseminate that new stuff,” Nichols said. “I feel so incredibly bad for the young scientists and even the mid-career folks now.”
Organ stressed the importance of federal biological research that has been going on for more than a century, as it uncovered the effects of pesticides like DDT on wildlife, developed adaptive harvest management for waterfowl, and revealed “the mysteries of large mammal migrations in the West,” he said.
The first Trump administration actually took steps to improve the conservation of ungulate migration corridors through the signing and implementation of Secretarial Order 3362, or “Improving Habitat Quality in Western Big Game Winter Range and Migration Corridors,” said TWS CEO Ed Arnett.
“It was the science, mapping, and stories told by USGS scientists from the Wyoming CRU and their partners that really jump-started that interest in migration corridor policy,” Arnett said. “If we lose federal science capacity, we lose critical information that informs both current and future policy and management efforts, and that should concern the entire conservation community and the public.”
Cuts to CRUs
The loss of USGS’ Cooperative Research Units, which are made up of a mix of government scientists and university researchers and students, presents a huge threat to wildlife monitoring, management and conservation, Organ said. States will feel the brunt of any cuts to these programs, as they operate like the research arms of many state agencies.
CRUs partner with universities and agencies, but Organ said it would be impossible for these entities to pick up the slack on research from USGS. “While these institutions do outstanding work, they cannot fill the void left by the loss of 120 scientists, their students and staff dedicated purely to solving the real-world problems of management agencies,” Organ said. “The Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units currently support around 600 master’s and Ph.D. students. Who will train the next generation of fish and wildlife managers, scientists and leaders while conducting actionable science to help ensure future generations will be able to enjoy and benefit from our public trust in wildlife?”
