Bison restoration has profound implications for ecological, economic and cultural domains, especially restoration into their former historic ranges. Climate change and climate variability, however, threaten sustainable restoration progress. The historic range of bison centered on the prairies of the Great Plains but spanned from Alaska to Mexico and from the Pacific coast to Florida and Pennsylvania, land which is now primarily privately held. Today, 63% of the 184,000 privately owned bison are located in the northern Great Plains, with 12,000 additional bison in the public sector, and 20,000 additional bison in each of the non-profit NGO and Tribal sectors. This multi-sectoral production-conservation system is referred to as the bison management system (BMS) and all sectors are intricately and economically linked through the production market and the cross-transferal of surplus animals. Bison are native ecological keystone species in native prairies and help to restore ecosystems. Their innate wallowing behavior produces shallow bare-soil depressions which create habitat for many other prairie-inhabiting species. Because bison create these wallows by excavating, urinating, and rolling, they also open the seed bank and concentrate nutrient inputs, and in turn increase plant biodiversity in the immediately adjacent landscape. Economically, the bison market has grown over the past 20 years, with bison market returns 1.5–3.3 times that of cattle. Finally, bison repopulation on Tribal lands increases food sovereignty, enhances economic stability, and revitalizes cultural connections to Tribal lands. The newly established Center of Excellence for Bison Studies at South Dakota State University aims to advance research, education, and outreach that address issues associated with each the ecological, economic, and cultural domains throughout the BMS, and is especially focused on restoration challenges associated with climate change and climate variability in conservation and production settings.

How did rapid ecological change and transformation in the Middle and Southern Rockies unfold during a previous, dramatic climate warming? Answering this question could help resource managers better prepare for such phenomena in the future. We leveraged the Neotoma Paleoecology Database to develop the record of landscape-scale rapid ecological change and transformation of vegetation over the last 21,000 years in the Middle and Southern Rockies ecoregions. We modeled the climate drivers of rapid vegetation change and transformation at the landscape scale with TRacE21ka paleoclimate output in Boosted Regression Trees, and we modeled the role of landscape characteristics at the site-level with a Bayesian approach. We identified 60 unique transformations across all 29 sites that took 21 different forms. We found that, at the landscape scale, a 2 ℃ rise in temperature initiated rapid ecological change, and a 5 ℃ rise led to ecological transformation. We also found that landscape characteristics played only a minor role in climate-driven vegetation change, with somewhat faster change on southwest-facing slopes in the Southern Rockies. In addition, transition out of any one particular vegetation type generally resulted in a diverse array of ecological trajectories and outcomes across sites, suggesting that managers would benefit from considering multiple potential ecological futures in climate adaptation planning. This study shows that rapid warming, to the degree expected within the next few decades in the Southern and Middle Rockies, can trigger landscape-scale ecological changes, regardless of the landscape context.