Cons Sci Seminar

February 6, 2026

Voyageurs Wolf Project: insights from a decade of research in northern Minnesota, USA

Dr. Joseph Bump

Professor, UMN Dept of Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation Biology

No recording available

Abstract

Since 2015 we have led a field-based research and outreach effort to better understand and share the summer ecology of wolves along the United States-Canadian border in north-central Minnesota, USA. This effort was coined the Voyageurs Wolf Project at the University of Minnesota to denote a sustained, collaborative study of the predation behavior, reproductive ecology, and functional role of wolves. This presentation will detail the key insights from this project to date, including wolf predation of beaver and fish, indirect effects of wolves on wetlands and forests, and how humans shape wolf predation. Lessons learned from our ‘field-to-phone’ social media presence will be detailed. Graphic art that profiles unique wolves studied by the project and artistic scientific posters will illustrate novel outreach and education efforts. Combined, these aspects address all conference themes and will demonstrate how we meet our goal of coupling cutting-edge, rigorous animal ecology research with highly effective broader impacts. Our research has important management and conservation implications for wolf–ungulate systems subjected to anthropogenic pressures, particularly as the range of overlap between wolves and deer expands and appears to be altering food web dynamics in boreal ecosystems.

Biosketch

Bump holds the Gordon W. Gullion Endowed Chair in Wildlife Research and Education and is Director of Graduate Studies for the Conservation Science Program at the University of Minnesota. Bump’s focus is on the functional role wildlife species play—alive and dead—in ecosystems and how that applies to biodiversity conservation. He currently leads research projects in Voyageurs, Isle Royale, and Yellowstone National Parks, across Minnesota, and in Switzerland, Kenya, and India. Bump’s curiosity in the natural world began with a childhood spent mucking around the Hudson River and Tivoli Bays in New York. He earned most of his college tuition by catching salmon as a commercial fisherman on the northside of Kodiak Island, Alaska, which was a formative experience in the natural world. Undergraduate field courses at the University of Michigan’s Biological Station confirmed Bump’s interest in animal ecology and he finished a biology degree in just a little over four years. Jobless at the turn of the century, Bump followed a woman west to Wyoming and through much luck, support, and steady effort he bounced between the Great Lakes and the Rockies Mountains in North America, earning degrees and positions until now. He has two sons and lives in St. Paul, Minnesota with a cat, a dog, and the same love that led him west.

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