Wood Buffalo National Park was established in 1922 to protect the habitat of a small herd of wood bison whose declining population had dropped from an estimated 40 million in 1830 to less than 1000 by 1900. Today, the 44 807 square kilometres of northern boreal interior plains landscape, located in the extreme north of Alberta and overlapping into the Northwest Territories, encompasses not only the largest free- roaming and self-regulated bison herd in the world but the world’s only natural nesting site of the whooping crane. Now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, as well as Canada’s largest park, it has the longest-standing tradition of native subsistence use by the people who continue to live, hunt, trap and fish within the park’s boundaries. Wood Buffalo National Park protects representative examples of the northern boreal plains, southern boreal plains and northwestern boreal uplands.