The Klamath Tribes and USGS Plan Ahead for Chronic Wasting Disease

The Klamath Tribes — the Klamath, Modoc and Yahooskin Paiute peoples — have lived on their ancestral lands in Oregon and California since time immemorial. Tribal members hold rights to hunt, fish, trap and gather within the 1.19 million acres of their Reserved Treaty Rights Area, including the right to harvest mule deer and elk.

Those animals matter enormously to the Tribes. They are a primary source of protein, are traded within the Klamath Tribes and with other tribes, and supply materials for cultural and sacred items such as regalia. But human-caused changes threaten them — and the people who depend on them.

A threat on the horizon

Mule deer have been declining across the western states for decades, pressed by frequent and lasting drought, wildfire, habitat loss and degradation, collisions with vehicles, and growing barriers to their migrations between summer and winter ranges. Those migrations, which let deer reach the best seasonal habitat, also expose them to another danger: chronic wasting disease (CWD), a fatal prion disease of deer that has been found in 36 U.S. states.

When CWD was detected in free-ranging mule deer in northern Idaho in 2021, the Tribes began planning how to watch for it, prevent it and respond to it, to protect the deer and elk of the Reserved Treaty Rights Area.

Planning together

In 2023 the Klamath Tribes Natural Resources Department began building a CWD plan, drawing on early input from the Klamath Indian Game Commission and working with scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey. The partnership uses structured decision making and mathematical models to weigh possible management strategies. The goal is a transparent assessment built on the Tribes' own values that can guide local management of the resources they depend on — and that may help agencies across Oregon work together for healthy, lasting deer and elk populations.

Phase 1 — Scoping (2023)

The USGS held conversations with the Tribes' Natural Resources Department to agree on the scope and scale of the planning, build working relationships, and understand the complex social and ecological system of mule deer, elk, their environment and the region's people.

Phase 2 — A first evaluation (2023–2024)

The two teams quickly analyzed how CWD strategies might perform over the next 10 years across the Tribes' historically ceded territories, focusing on the Reserved Treaty Rights Area. The Tribes set seven objectives reflecting their values:

1. maximize sustainable mule deer populations in the Reserved Treaty Rights Area;
2. maintain a sustainable elk population there;
3. minimize the risk of CWD spreading into and among deer and elk herds that live in or migrate through the ceded territories;
4. maximize outreach to tribal members about CWD risks and rules;
5. minimize the resources needed to manage CWD, elk and deer;
6. maximize tribal members' chances to exercise their treaty rights to hunt, fish and gather, and to practice cultural activities;
7. maximize tribal members' spiritual, physical and mental health and well-being.

The Natural Resources Department drafted five strategies, ranging in how strongly they respond before and after CWD is detected. They include actions aimed at deer directly — for example, changing access to shared watering spots, called guzzlers, where many species gather and disease could pass between them — as well as actions on habitat and on people's relationships with deer, plus efforts to talk with tribal members about CWD's dangers. The teams then estimated how each strategy would perform against the seven objectives, combining expert judgment with simple models of how CWD might spread once it arrives.

Next steps (2025 and beyond)

Drawing on what the first evaluation revealed, the Tribes are revisiting the plan's major elements:

• The five strategies will be refined to fit the plan the Tribes want.
• The USGS is building more realistic models to predict how well each option would meet the Tribes' objectives over 10 and 20 years, given that no one knows when CWD will arrive.
• The Natural Resources Department will keep working with the Tribes' advisory committees.
• The USGS will provide technical support for drafting the plan and carrying out its education and surveillance work.

Sources

• McEachran MC, Guntly-Yancey KM, Berl REW, Gentry D, Runge MC, White C, Cook JD. A Partnership Between the USGS and the Klamath Tribes to Apply Structured Decision Making for Chronic Wasting Disease Management. U.S. Geological Survey Fact Sheet 2025–3012 (2025), prepared in cooperation with the Klamath Tribes Natural Resources Department; a work of the United States government. The imported copy began partway through; the introduction came from the fact sheet's PDF. Its photographs belong to the Klamath Tribes Natural Resources Department and are not reproduced.