Yellowstone to Yukon: Transborder conservation across a vast international landscape

During the mid-1990s, conservationists in the Rocky Mountains of the United States and Canada encountered the assonant composite of two nationally iconic words: "Yellowstone to Yukon." Y2Y attracted a significant audience within the conservation world, not least-but not only-because each word connoted touchstone beliefs about wildness, wilderness, and wildlife. Today Y2Y is widely recognized as one of the earliest transboundary "large landscape" conservation initiatives, and the Y2Y label applies to a landscape vision, a geographic region, a conservation mission, a network, and an organization. More indefinite is the degree to which Y2Y has served as a form of mountain governance. Y2Y has helped to establish an interconnected community of conservation practitioners and conservation supporters, has channeled sizeable scientific attention toward the needs of far-ranging wildlife and, via norm entrepreneurialism and discursive shift, has brought about significant coherence within the conservation community on the need for landscape connectivity. Yet while some decision makers have formally recognized Y2Y, the influence on higherlevel governance has been mostly indirect. And although Y2Y has been held up as a model for mountain biodiversity conservation, that model is more reflective of conservation biology than of governance theory. Nonetheless, in its multiple forms, Y2Y does influence and enhance conservation activities in the region. Most recently, the Y2Y Conservation Initiative, a non-profit organization registered in both Canada and the US, has focused on key "priority areas" within the larger region. Looking forward, even as Y2Y has achieved tangible success on a number of fronts, it faces myriad challenges that will require an increasingly responsive, open-minded, and adaptive approach to conservation. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.