Since 2011, researchers at the Borderlands Research Institute (BRI) at Sul Ross State University have been working to restore the population of pronghorn across the Trans-Pecos region.
They've been relocating groups of the animals from the Texas panhandle - where they're more abundant - to the Trans-Pecos, where pronghorn populations had dropped to an all-time low of just over 2,000 before the project started.
According to Dr. Whitney Gann, a research scientist at the BRI, the decimation was due to a "perfect storm" of factors - ranging from land use practices and fencing methods that prevented pronghorn from traveling freely, to invasive brush that harmed the grasses pronghorn eat and severe drought conditions across the region.
But researchers have made progress. Their latest data, released Tuesday, show pronghorn numbers across the Trans-Pecos have bounced back from that historic low of about 2,000 to just over 5,000 today.
Dr. Gann sat down with us at the Trans-Pecos Wildlife Conference at Sul Ross to talk about the restoration effort, its success, lessons learned and the next round of relocations researchers have planned for 2017.
