The National Park Service has approved a management plan for elk and bison on Great Sand Dunes National Preserve in Colorado/NPS file

Bison will continue to roam Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado under a plan approved by the National Park Service, but initially the number within the park will shrink.

The plan, which also outlines how elk within Great Sand Dunes are to be managed, gained final approval Monday. Under it, the bison currently part of The Nature Conservancy's Zapata Ranch adjacent to Great Sand Dunes will be removed from the park over the next 5-7 years. During that period, the herd will be culled. While the ranch herd currently numbers about 1,700, most, if not all, of those bison carry cattle genes. Since the Park Service wants genetically pure bison herds, it will restock the park with animals from Interior Department herds, starting out with 25-50.

From that point, the Park Service will assume full management of the herd and allow it grow to 80-260 animals, and, in future years, to possibly as many as 580. The management plan also mentions the possibility of allowing park bison to roam onto the adjacent Baca National Wildlife Refuge down the road.

The plan's direction on bison management dovetails with the Interior Department's long-running initiative to place more conservation herds of bison on federal lands in the West. Conservation herds differ from commercial herds in that they are managed to preserve bison genes and for cultural and ecological purposes.

"As evidenced during tribal consultation and in public comments received during scoping and on the Draft EIS, bison are a culturally significant resource and ensuring continuity of bison on the landscape during the transition from TNC to NPS management was an important factor in selecting this alternative," the Record of Decision said. 

As for elk in the park, the Park Service intends to work to redistribute elk away from areas of "overconcentration."

"Implementation will be coordinated with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and (Colorado Parks and Wildlife) CPW in an effort to increase opportunities for hunter harvest outside of the Park," the park said in its Record of Decision approving the management plans. "If elk quickly reoccupy the areas where redistribution efforts were focused then the intensity of lethal removal actions will increase. If elk redistribute to undesirable areas, including neighboring agricultural lands, particularly those in Data Analysis Unit  E-55 where CPW’s population objective for elk is zero), redistribution efforts would cease immediately and NPS would coordinate with its partners to address the situation."