Wasatch and Uinta montane forests


The Wasatch and Uinta montane forest is a temperate coniferous forest ecoregion in the Wasatch Range and Uinta Mountains of the western Rocky Mountains system, in the Western United States. The ecoregion was defined by the World Wildlife Fund, taken from an ecoregion defined by Omernik and used in the EPA ecoregion system.

Setting

This ecoregion is located almost entirely within the state of Utah, with a very small portion stretching north into southwestern Wyoming and southeastern Idaho. This ecoregion covers the driest ranges of the Rocky Mountains, in the rain shadow of the Sierra Nevada to the west.

Flora

The dominant vegetation type of this ecoregion is coniferous forest, composed mainly of ponderosa pine, Rocky Mountain Douglas-fir, subalpine fir, Engelmann spruce, Rocky Mountain juniper, two-needle piñon, and trembling aspen, with limited populations of limber pine. This ecoregion is unique from other Rocky Mountain ecoregions in that large areas are dominated by gambel oak and bigtooth maple.

Fauna

Mammals include mule deer, elk, moose, bighorn sheep, mountain goat, black bear cougar, and wolverine
Brown bear and gray wolf, are also native to these forests, and much of the rest of Utah, but have been extirpated due to hunting, with brown bears having not been found in Utah since roughly 1922, when the last grizzly bear Old Ephraim was shot and killed. Gray wolves have begun to return to Utah, primarily in the far northeastern reaches of state, where it borders Wyoming and Idaho. Both bears and wolves have been under threat, due primarily to the livestock industry which is an obstacle currently preventing their return.

Threats and preservation

The majority of this ecoregion has been greatly affected by livestock grazing, logging, mining, and recreational uses such as downhill skiing, and as a result, its conservation status is "critical/endangered". Very few areas are protected, and the largest area that is protected, the High Uintas Wilderness in northeastern Utah, mainly protects areas in the high alpine zone, with the more diverse montane and subalpine zones being almost entirely unprotected. The main threats to this ecoregion's integrity are motorised recreation, widespread livestock grazing and downhill skiing. This region has also been severely effected by mountain pine beetle outbreaks in the last decades, killing large swathes of forest.