Delisting the Northern Rocky Mountain Gray Wolf from the U.S. Endangered Species Act: An assessment of political discourse over 20 years

Feared, revered, and politicized, wolves have long captured human imagination and ignited fierce conservation conflicts. In the United States, the Endangered Species Act protects species at risk of extinction from human impacts. This far-reaching legislation, which impacts development and state-level wildlife management, has been fraught with legal battles and controversy. The gray wolf, first listed in 1974, exemplifies the tumultuous back-and-forth of listed species. In 2011, Congress, rather than wildlife management agencies in the executive branch of government, delisted the gray wolf in two Northern Rocky Mountain states using legislative action, specifically a rider on a budget bill. Since then, gray wolf territory has expanded, and controversy over gray wolf management prevails. Our study used quantitative structural topic modeling to assess political discourse surrounding the Rocky Mountain gray wolf delisting in newspapers and other documents between 2005 and 2025, allowing us ..., , # Data from: Delisting the Northern Rocky Mountain Gray Wolf from the U.S. Endangered Species Act: An assessment of political discourse over 20 years

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.s4mw6m9kc](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.s4mw6m9kc)

## Description of the data and file structure

This dataset includes citations and primary output columns for news articles and documents published between January 1, 2005, and March 2025 on the topic of gray wolves in the Northern Rocky Mountains region of the United States. In this search, we used “Wolf Delisting” with boolean operators to specify the state or region (i.e., “Rocky Mountain”, “Idaho”, “Montana”, and “Wyoming). Articles and relevant quotes were acquired from the U.S. Newsstream Proquest Database; titles and publishing news sources can be used to acquire the articles via the user's home institution.

### Files and variables

#### File: wolf_article_data_cites_links.csv

**Description:** Datafile including articles and quotes regarding gray wol...,