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SRI stands on the shoulders of giants. By using our own expertise to coordinate research within numerous disciplines, we can draw on a larger pool of knowledge to make blended-value decisions tailored to a particular property and landscapes.
By harnessing the power of the available science, we can better identify and prioritize conservation and restoration goals. The greatest ecological function of one piece of land may be as a source of cold, clean, mountain water for an endangered fish; another property may be a winter refuge to thousands of migrating elk. Each scenario is different, so local experts and existing research help us to focus our goals.
For example, the Schroeder Ranch, south of Lolo, MT is the site of the last best corridor between the Salmon-Selway and the Continental Divide Ecosystems, both vast intact ecosystem remnants in the Yellowstone-to-Yukon (Y2Y) corridor. Striving to maintain this connectivity allows disparate populations of far-ranging animals to maintain genetic connections to each other, or to repopulate areas from which they have been extirpated. Research and experts pointed to the maintenance of this Y2Y corridor as one of the greatest assets of the Schroeder Ranch, so the Y2Y linkage played a key role in shaping our conservation strategy.
The Sun Ranch has also hosted numerous graduate research projects ranging from archeology to wolf-ungulate interactions. Data from these studies, warehoused by SRI, complements our own ongoing research efforts on the ranch. The data are available to anyone motivated to initiate research.
We aim to lower the barriers to conducting research on private property, and we facilitate ongoing research projects that are meaningful to the scientific community and lay communities alike.
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