THESE TWO MAPS were produced by CALS forest ecologist David Mladenoff and colleagues to show where gray wolves live–and are likely to live–in Wisconsin.
In the first map, black polygons represent known wolf pack territories mapped by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources in 2007, using both radio telemetry and field mapping. They are shown superimposed over classification of land use and land cover classes from the U.S. National Land Cover Data program (NLCD 2006) based on Landsat satellite images.
In the second figure, the same wolf pack territories are shown on a map based on a GIS model of the probability of wolves successfully occupying a part of the landscape. (Red areas are the most wolf friendly; blue areas are the least.) The areas currently occupied by wolves were used to calculate the model, which considered the presence of roads and agriculture as negative factors in how habitable the landscape might be to wolves.
Map credit: Change in Occupied Wolf Habitat in the Northern Great Lakes Region. 2009. David J. Mladenoff, Murray K. Clayton, Sarah D. Pratt, Theodore A. Sickley and Adrian P. Wydeven. The article appears in Recovery of Gray Wolves in the Great Lakes Region of the United States: An Endangered Species Success Story, a book edited by Adrian P. Wydeven, Timothy R.Van Deelen and Edward J. Heske, published by
Springer in 2009.