DOI: 10.5061/dryad.s4mw6m9kc
title: Data from: Delisting the Northern Rocky Mountain Gray Wolf from the U.S. Endangered Species Act: An assessment of political discourse over 20 years

description: Feared, revered, and politicized, wolves have long captured human
 imagination and ignited fierce conservation conflicts. In the United
 States, the Endangered Species Act protects species at risk of extinction
 from human impacts. This far-reaching legislation, which impacts
 development and state-level wildlife management, has been fraught with
 legal battles and controversy. The gray wolf, first listed in 1974,
 exemplifies the tumultuous back-and-forth of listed species. In 2011,
 Congress, rather than wildlife management agencies in the executive branch
 of government, delisted the gray wolf in two Northern Rocky Mountain
 states using legislative action, specifically a rider on a budget bill.
 Since then, gray wolf territory has expanded, and controversy over gray
 wolf management prevails. Our study used quantitative structural topic
 modeling to assess political discourse surrounding the Rocky Mountain gray
 wolf delisting in newspapers and other documents between 2005 and 2025,
 allowing us to assess how different stakeholders discuss the gray wolf and
 how language has shifted over time. In our study, we find that
 nongovernmental organizations are generally the most vocal in gray wolf
 discourse. Further, our results show that the 2011 delisting shifted the
 language used by a variety of stakeholders when debating gray wolf
 management, with the 2011 delisting being used as both a cautionary
 example and a model to follow.
description: # Data from: Delisting the Northern Rocky Mountain Gray Wolf from the U.S.
 Endangered Species Act: An assessment of political discourse over 20 years
 Dataset DOI:
 [10.5061/dryad.s4mw6m9kc](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.s4mw6m9kc) ##
 Description of the data and file structure This dataset includes citations
 and primary output columns for news articles and documents published
 between January 1, 2005, and March 2025 on the topic of gray wolves in the
 Northern Rocky Mountains region of the United States. In this search, we
 used “Wolf Delisting” with boolean operators to specify the state or
 region (i.e., “Rocky Mountain”, “Idaho”, “Montana”, and “Wyoming).
 Articles and relevant quotes were acquired from the U.S. Newsstream
 Proquest Database; titles and publishing news sources can be used to
 acquire the articles via the user's home institution. ### Files and
 variables #### File: wolf_article_data_cites_links.csv
 **Description:** Datafile including articles and quotes regarding gray
 wolf delisting in the Northern Rocky Mountain region of the United States.
 ##### Variables * Number: Article # * Title: Title of the article *
 Relevant: Y=relevant and not reviewed before, N=not relevant, D=relevant
 but reviewed already * Date_Published: Date article was published *
 Date_bin: categories for analysis, before 2011 delisting, during 2011
 delisting, after 2011 delisting. * SearchTerm: Terms used to reach that
 article * Keywords: Preselected keywords, categorized by article reviewer
 * Branch: Stakeholder category for quoted person indicated by article
 reviewer * PoliticalActor: Name of stakeholder being quoted ##
 Code/software We used Microsoft Excel to create the dataset. R studio was
 used for Structural Topic Modeling Analysis using SnowballC package to
 remove uninformative stopwords, and the STM package (with estimateEffect
 function) ## Access information Other publicly accessible locations of the
 data: *
 [https://github.com/jwillou/wolf_textanalysis](https://github.com/jwillou/wolf_textanalysis) Data was derived from the following sources: * U.S. Newsstream Proquest Database