Across deciduous and evergreen forests, lakes, streams and wetlands, working farms and timber lands, Québec, Canada is enormously rich in ecological diversity. However, pressures from people—residential and commercial development, climate change, and pollution—increasingly threaten the biodiversity that depends on intact habitats. Black bears and eastern wolves need wide swaths of land in their home ranges to find food and mates, wood turtles rely on unfragmented corridors to safely reach water sources, and migratory birds need stepping stones of habitat for their seasonal movements.
Exploring options to improve traveler safety and maintain wildlife movement in a gateway to Yellowstone Yellowstone National Park’s 2.2 million acres provide critical habitat for the largest concentration of wildlife in the lower 48 states. But this habitat doesn’t stop at the park borders. Herds of elk, deer and pronghorn move in and out of
Turkmenistan’s “Mountain Ecosystems of Koytendag” (MEK) make up one of the most distinctive and richly biodiverse landscapes in Central Asia. However, the area faces mounting threats to its conservation, including agricultural expansion, overgrazing, illegal hunting, and unmanaged tourism. As part of our project ‘Connectivity, Capacity, and Cats: Building Resiliency in the Mountain Ecosystems of Koytendag,’ funded by the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF), national and international experts traveled around this extraordinary region from 5-11 April 2023. Among the goals was to help evaluate the possibility of it being officially designated as a UNESCO Natural World Heritage Site.
This week the U.S. Geological Survey and other federal agencies released a report showing a staggering 1.3 million acres of sagebrush habitat are being lost annually. Called “A Sagebrush Conservation Design Framework to Proactively Restore America’s Sagebrush Biome,” this new body of science uses some of the latest mapping tools to identify healthy and degraded sagebrush areas, where and how it’s being lost, and lays out a path to slow the loss.
This fact sheet explains habitat connectivity legislation Colorado, Senate Joint Resolution 21-021, which passed unanimously in 2021. This bipartisan-led legislation a) commissions report identifying wildlife corridors, their benefits, and voluntary policies and programs that would support willing landowners to improve habitat connectivity across the landscape; b) encourages state agencies to build on Governor Jared Polis’
When we hear the term “ecological corridors” we tend to think of the natural pathways that land animals like elk or elephants use to move among larger natural areas to eat, drink, mate and meet other survival needs. Corridors are equally important for marine life like whales, turtles, fish, and seabirds, which depend on linkages between ocean areas for daily movement, seasonal migration, and completing their life cycles. Until recently, collaborative research and guidance on marine ecological connectivity had been lacking, but now the Center for Large Landscape Conservation is supporting coordination of work by a unique group of experts that is making the issue a top priority.
Akash Patil of India spoke of his first encounter with a leopard and his subsequent commitment to a career in conservation. Nayla Azmi told a story of growing up in an Indonesian palm oil plantation and her journey to become an orangutan protector. Sarah Kulis, a recent graduate from West Virginia University, and legally blind, encouraged other aspiring conservationists with disabilities to persevere. These were three of the young storytellers who shared their experiences in conservation at the Center’s workshop at the recent IUCN Global Youth Summit.
From 4-7 November 2019, over 50 scientists, conservation experts, natural resource managers, and policymakers from 13 countries gathered in Poiana Brasov to advance the practice of connectivity conservation in Romania and the wider Carpathian Mountains; one of Europe’s most biodiverse and intact ecosystems. Convened under the leadership of the BearConnect Project Research Consortium, the Center
This excerpt discusses the definition of connectivity for addressing wildlife responses to climate change and compare it to connectivity under current conditions. Guidance is provided on identifying, prioritizing, and protecting connectivity as a tool for facilitating wildlife conservation in light of climate change. Clarity on how to define and identify these connectivity needs will be
By REQUEST ONLY: Road ecology research has tended to focus on wildlife-vehicle collisions (WVCs) while omitting or failing to differentiate domestic (i.e., livestock) animal-vehicle collisions (DAVCs). Using a ten-year collision data set for Montana, we show that WVCs and DAVCs occur at different times of the day, during different seasons of the year, and in
