Our goal is to enable human beings to live in harmony with other species. Institute programs strive to increase our understanding of wilderness systems through basic, innovative scientific research.
Understanding does little good without action.
We work to increase public use and awareness of this critical ecological knowledge through scientific publications and more popular forms of communication such as films, lecture presentations and books. Our overall goal is to ensure that decisions affecting wildlife and wild landscapes are based on the best available scientific knowledge and are not compromised by political expediency. Landscapes and species have evolved together as functioning systems. Animals and plants have migrated and dispersed across landscapes for millennia in order to survive and reproduce. Landscape processes such as wildfire and disease and hydrologic events such as periodic floods have been a part of these systems.