World-renowned for their striking beauty and high mountain topography, the Southern Rockies are one of North America's gems. From alpine tundra to ponderosa pine forests and sagebrush grasslands, over 500 vertebrate species find their home in the Southern Rockies, and a rich variety of plants and invertebrate species can also be found within its borders.

Over 270 species of butterflies and 5,200 species of moths make the Southern Rockies the second leading hotspot in North America for the insect order Lepidoptera (SREP 2004). The Southern Rockies maintains this abundance partially because of its continuous stretches of wild, remote and undeveloped lands.

And yet, this biodiversity and abundance is threatened, as are many wild places in North America, due to human expansion and development: native species have been extirpated, old-growth forests logged, wild and powerful rivers dammed and polluted, and land degraded and developed.

The Southern Rockies Wildlands Network Vision calls for ecological protection and restoration. The Vision addresses not only the symptoms and the problems, but also their root cause(s).

The mission of this Vision, facilitated by the Southern Rockies Ecosystem Project, the Denver Zoo and the Wildlands Project, is to protect and rewild the regional landscape. "Rewilding" recognizes the importance of top-down regulation to healthy ecosystems. It emphasizes large core wild areas, functional connectivity across the landscape, and the vital role of keystone species and processes, especially large carnivores (Soule and Terborgh 19991).

This Vision is only the first step towards a working, living and changing plan for the Southern Rockies. As knowledge accumulates, methods improve or change, and conservation opportunities arise, successive iterations will change the conservation plan, and therefore, the Network Design, of the Southern Rockies.

The conservation plan was developed using a three-track approach of incorporating special elements, focal species, and vegetation community representation. The wildlife movement analyses were models of wolf and bear dispersal paths to determine where wide-ranging carnivores were likely to traverse between areas of suitable habitat.

We then incorporated existing citizen management and wilderness proposals for National Forests and BLM land, as well as local and regional expert opinion and review through several workshops and review periods to derive the Network Design with its various levels of compatible use and management.

The result is a design that emphasizes wild areas interconnected on a landscape-scale, providing long-term suitable habitat for large carnivores and a high level of native ecological diversity.