Policy Foundations for a Path Forward in Large Landscape Connectivity Conservation

What do Sarah Palin, Janet Napolitano, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Bill Richardson all have in common? They signed a 2007 Western Governors Association (WGA) policy resolution entitled Protecting Wildlife Migration Corridors and Crucial Wildlife Habitat in the West. That document was arguably the first quasi-governmental recognition of the value of wildlife corridors. It laid the foundation for a cross-state collaborative effort to identify key wildlife corridors and habitats in the western U.S. and to make recommendations on needed policy options and tools for preserving them. Since then, leading states like Washington have developed Crucial Habitat Assessment Tools (CHATs), and the WGA Wildlife Council is creating a regional CHAT to provide an informed and continually updated picture of crucial wildlife habitat across the western U.S. Both state and regional CHATs will be non-regulatory and will simply provide planners scientific data on a broad scale for use in project analysis, siting, and planning (WGA 2012).

This represents a significant step forward—states agreeing to think beyond their own boundaries at ecologically relevant regional scales, sharing data, and using wildlife habitat science to inform projects spanning multiple jurisdictions. This trend is also happening across most relevant agencies of the federal government and is noteworthy for the ecological restoration community. Undoubtedly the designation and conservation of wildlife corridors will necessitate an array of restoration activities, from reconnecting fragmented forests, to reestablishing native plant communities, to managing invasive species, to the construction of safe wildlife crossings along the thousands of miles of roadways that traverse wildlife corridors.

Obama's conservation record has not drawn great praise, yet he has presided over a broad array of new initiatives that hopefully can be heralded as the way of the future. (Granted, some of these were in the works before his tenure). All the major federal agencies have some sort of climate adaptation plan prepared or in the works, many of which recognize habitat connectivity as a key adaptation strategy for wildlife in a changing world (Delach 2011). As with new ideas, plenty of confusion among agency staff encircles many of these initiatives, and all this action does not necessarily mean the wandering wolverine is home free. In this article, we briefly outline important recent policy examples of this burst of policy activity on connectivity. But first, some background.

The Path to Official Recognition of Connectivity

In 1992, conservation biologist Reed Noss set out the Wildlands Project Land Conservation Strategy in the first special issue of Wild Earth (Noss 1992). In it he comprehensively outlined the model that brought the new discipline of conservation biology into conservation activism. The article announced the need for continental scale conservation, and Noss argued even the largest reserves would not be big enough to maintain biodiversity and requisite genetic exchange. Therefore, connectivity between reserves needed to be maintained or restored. Managers were urged to think at landscape scales—that is, to let ecology, not politics, drive planning. The debate over whether single large or several small reserves were more functional was lively, as was a debate over whether conservationists should invest in bigger cores or more connections, because resources were limited. Noss's comprehensive strategy called for nothing less than an alternative vision for North America—one based on what a biologically healthy North America would look like rather than one in which a few outdoor zoos remained in areas industrial civilization thought it could afford to leave alone.

In 1993 and 1994, the Wildlands Project (now Wildlands Network) held a series of meetings across North America to solicit partners to undertake Wildlands Network Designs that, when woven together, would create a continental system of connected protected areas, wildlife corridors, and buffers capable of maintaining and restoring native species and ecosystem types, and within which natural disturbance regimes would be allowed to operate. Out of these meetings came a number of large landscape connectivity-oriented groups, such as Yellowstone to Yukon, with dozens more forming over years to come. At the same time, and in some cases prior...