Vital Ground

With the grizzly bear as its compass, Vital Ground works to reconnect fragmented landscapes in the U.S. and Canada critical to wildlife movement and biodiversity. Because the grizzly’s range covers several hundred square miles—from alpine meadows to valley bottoms—protecting and expanding habitat and migration corridors important to the Great Bear benefits entire animal and plant communities in the wildest, yet most imperiled, places left in North America.

Operating as a land trust, the mission of The Vital Ground Foundation is to protect and restore North America’s grizzly bear populations by conserving wildlife habitat.

Vital Ground believes the grizzly bear, as an umbrella species, is one of nature’s barometers of a healthy and complete ecosystem. Because the grizzly’s home range covers several hundred square miles—from alpine meadows to valley bottoms—protecting grizzly habitat benefits entire plant and animal communities in the wildest, most scenic, places left on the continent.

Grizzly and other brown bear populations persist only in the continent’s last wilderness ecosystems. Between, within, and at the edges of these ecosystems, roads and development are rapidly filling open lands and valley floors, frittering away once wild landscapes and creating “habitat fracture zones.”

Habitat links between these wild grizzly sanctuaries—lands that provide food, shelter and security for seasonal foraging and movement—are the crux point of grizzly survival and recovery. Today these lands are clad in streamside willows and cottonwoods, pastures, grasslands, wet meadows, clear waters, and conifer forests—habitat for innumerable species. Tomorrow they could be peppered with homes, roads, and other developments.

This is where VG target their resources and efforts. Acre by acre, they protect jigsaw puzzlepieces of habitat to maintain the lifelines between grizzly ecosystems. Lifelines that will help sustain bears and everything else that depends ongrizzly country.