The gray wolf, Canis lupus, can be found across the North Pacific West, throughout Idaho, Montana, Washington, Oregon and Wyoming. There are also gray wolf species found in Alaska and by the Great Lakes, but we will be focusing on the PNW wolves. These wolves have seen years of decline and increase in population size throughout the decades due to hunting mandates and conservation efforts. As of 2014, the wolf population was around 1,700 across the five states (US Fisheries and Wildlife, 2017). The population of wolves can easily be affected in numerous ways, such as human impacts or intraspecies interactions (Hochard & Finnoff, 2014).
The gray wolf has been known to travel all across North America, having populations from Mexico to Alaska. These wolves have been known to help food webs, they help primary and secondary consumers with the carcasses they leave, and help primary producers by keeping their predators out of their territory. But due to human colonization and expansion, the wolf population declined to only a few hundred (US Fisheries and Wildlife, 2011). The wolves were listed as endangered in 1974 to help increase their population. Due to these efforts they were able to become prominent in the North Pacific West, with numbers in the thousands.
