Alaska is a big, big place. At nearly 670,000 square miles -- you could fit Texas, California, and Montana into its borders -- there is barely one person per square mile. Yet state officials have identified more than 90 percent of Alaska as needing to be intensively managed for predator reductions so residents will be able to find game to kill for their pots.

Under that approach to ecosystem management, the state's focus on hunting has been in recent years to wipe out predators so ungulate populations will flourish and give residents, and even non-resident hunters, something to aim for.

Recently departed Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke tried to support that move by telling the National Park Service to relax its regulations regarding hunting of predators in national preserves in Alaska and by ordering the Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to let states management fish and game in their lands.

But in a paper that appeared last week in PLOS Biology, William J. RippleI, Sterling D. Miller, John W. Schoen, and Sanford P. Rabinowitch argued that the state's approach to predator control is not based on science and "can trigger a chain of events that can create a downward spiral toward ecosystem simplification."

"Furthermore, in Alaska and other states, the U.S. Department of the Interior needs to meet its legal mandate to manage for natural and healthy ecosystems in ways that are in the national interest. In Alaska, this will require not aligning hunting and trapping regulations on National Park Preserves and National Wildlife Refuges with state regulations that are designed to reduce naturally occurring densities of large carnivores," they wrote.

"The state of Alaska also should be candid with the public about the absence of science supporting the efficacy of predator control programs to achieve established objectives with regard to ungulate harvests instead of making unsupported claims of 'success' for wolf reduction efforts in publicly distributed booklets about Intensive Management. For bears, there are not even any claimed successes for increased harvests of adult moose or caribou resulting from increased bear harvests."