Large Landscape News

New Toolkit Helps Land Trusts with Wildlife Crossing Projects

While roads in our communities help connect us, they can also divide us by fragmenting landscapes. But now is an exciting time to be involved in conservation and transportation ecology–or the study and reduction of impacts of roads and other linear infrastructure on wildlife and nature; there are unprecedented funding opportunities and new state and federal policies to help implement projects to reduce wildlife-vehicle collisions and improve habitat connectivity. Land trusts can and do play a major role in these efforts.

Experts Agree on the Need for Climate-informed Wildlife Crossings

More than a dozen climate, wildlife, and road ecology experts from across the country wrote a consensus statement urging government officials at all levels to consider climate change when planning and constructing structures that help fish and wildlife cross under and over highways. As the appetite increases for solutions that improve wildlife migration and movement while reducing wildlife-vehicle collisions, there is a heightened need and opportunity for designing infrastructure that is sited and designed in ways that accommodate the current and anticipated impacts of climate change.

Meet Connectivity Science Expert Dr. Annika Keeley

Life seems to be coming full circle for Senior Conservation Scientist Dr. Annika Keeley. Annika currently resides in her sleepy German hometown of 6,000, working remotely for the Center for Large Landscape Conservation while visiting her parents – her typical habitat is that of Davis, California, just west of Sacramento. But it is her homeland countryside that spurred Annika’s love for nature and, more specifically, the science behind it.

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New National Policy Introduced to Conserve Wildlife Movement on Public Lands

While national parks may be the most familiar type of public lands, another type of federal sites make up roughly ten percent of the land area of the US. More than 2,400 U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) sites—from the Meadowood Trail System in Virginia to the Imperial Sand Dunes in California—have been set aside for a wide range of uses, including grazing, mining, and energy development, along with scientific, cultural, historical, and recreational purposes. But the BLM is also charged with conserving habitat for the wide variety of fish and wildlife that live on lands and waters managed by the agency. Now, a new BLM policy addresses the growing public concern over habitat fragmentation and the ability of species to move for their daily and seasonal needs.

The Center Celebrates Adoption of the Global Biodiversity Framework

Center staff have now returned from their adventures in Montreal, attending the UN Biodiversity Conference. Ecological connectivity—the unimpeded movement of species and the flow of natural processes that sustain life on Earth—was an exciting topic of negotiations and discussions during what is officially referred to as the 15th Conference of the Parties (CoP-15) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). In the final days of the conference, the governments of 196 countries adopted the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework on 18 December 2022. This milestone agreement will now serve as the strategic plan for implementation of the Convention over the period 2022-2030. To date, this is the most significant agreement for bolstering global cooperation to conserve and restore nature.

Asian elephants on newly constructed railway platform in Tamil Nadu – WWF India

USAID Launches Project to Strengthen Infrastructure Safeguards That Conserve Natural Resources and Support Livelihoods in Asia

MONTREAL, DEC. 15, 2022 – Asia is experiencing the highest infrastructure investment rates globally, led by transportation and energy sector expansion. Yet much of this planned infrastructure will bisect some of the world’s most biodiverse areas and affect access to vital natural resources that people depend upon for their livelihoods, such as forest products and clean water.

2022 Annual Report: Making Connections Across the Globe

As the year draws to a close, we are pleased to share with you our 2022 Annual Report. While it would be impossible to cover all of the Center’s work from the past year, we’re taking this opportunity to highlight a few programs and accomplishments that our generous supporters helped make possible. This report is also a celebration of the ways in which partnerships and collaboration with colleagues and institutions worldwide play a vital role in achieving our mission.

New Initiative Seeks to Connect Wild Spaces

WWF, the Center for Large Landscape Conservation and the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas’ Connectivity Conservation Specialist Group today launched a new initiative to conserve nature’s connections: Wildlife Connect. The initiative aims to secure ecological connectivity, defined by the Convention on Migratory Species as the “unimpeded movement of species and the flow of natural processes that sustain life on Earth.” From great migrations of wildlife across landscapes and continents to river flows from mountain to sea, nature’s circulatory system of connections is essential for a healthy planet. Yet they are rapidly disappearing, destabilizing ecosystems and the essential benefits they provide for us all.

Promoting Connectivity and Corridors at the National Adaptation Forum

It is one of the most pressing questions of our time: How do we adapt to the impacts of climate change? October 2022 marked the return of The National Adaptation Forum, which brought together climate adaptation practitioners to share ideas, evaluate opportunities, and create synergies across occupations to try to answer that urgent question. The scale of the challenges is great and because of this, practitioners from artists and municipal officials to natural resource managers came together to work towards systems-level change.

A herd of caribou grazes in a tundra field in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

Room to Roam: Connecting Data and People to Protect Wildlife Migrations

In an era where climate change, habitat loss, poaching and other human impacts put many species at risk, there is a need to understand where animals go and what they need to thrive. A new NASA-funded project—Room to Roam: Y2Y Wildlife Movements (Room2Roam)—aims to accelerate data analysis and coordination to improve wildlife management efforts across borders. The ambitious effort includes a regional network of partners in a major migration corridor of western North America.