The study, which appeared in the January 17 edition of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment (attached below), followed by a handful of years a wolf study in Yukon-Charley Rivers that was forced to end in 2016 because the Alaska Department of Fish and Game had sponsored a predator control program that had killed at least 90 wolves that had home ranges within the national preserve.
As a result of state shoot-on-sight and other lethal removal tactics, NPS concludes that the wolf population in the 2.5-million-acre national preserve is “no longer in a natural state” nor are there enough survivors to maintain a “self-sustaining population,” Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility said in a release at the time.
Cassidy’s research didn’t build on that Yukon-Charley Rivers study, which examined how the national preserve’s overall wolf population was affected by hunting outside the preserve, but rather drilled down into the hunting impacts on individual packs.