A Summary of Wildlands Project Science

Since June of 1864, when Abraham Lincoln interrupted his wartime schedule to sign legislation granting Yosemite Valley to the state of California for its permanent protection, conservationists have worked to save patches of primeval America. This inspiring but incomplete legacy of land protection is exemplified by the National Park and National Wilderness Preservation Systems in the United States, Canada's expansive parks and protected lands, and Mexico's growing number of conserved natural areas.

In the century that followed the preservation of Yosemite and Yellowstone, conservation action centered on landscapes that offered spectacular beauty, outstanding recreational opportunities, and spiritual benefits. Conserved lands were not chosen systematically to protect ecological values-indeed, it is now widely recognized that current protected areas are too small and too isolated to sustain native wildlife over time, and do not adequately represent the diversity of North America's natural communities.

While the foundational arguments of aesthetics, primitive recreation, and solitude remain compelling reasons to preserve wild places, today's conservation movement also emphasizes scientific, ecological, and evolutionary values, and, increasingly, the intrinsic rights of all members of the land community-from bears and bats to mussels and mosses-to exist for their own sake.

The Wildlands Project has helped push this revolution in thinking by articulating a new vision of parks and wilderness areas as the building blocks of wildlands networks that can sustain the full richness of our natural heritage.

Conservation biology has shown that fragmented habitat is a recipe for extinction, as species are stranded on islands of wildness surrounded by a sea of humanity. A substantial body of scientific evidence suggests that protecting large cores of wild habitat is essential to healthy ecosystems. But even large wilderness cores are not enough; to facilitate the flow of life across the entire landscape, these cores must be linked by corridors of wild habitat that allow the unimpeded movement of wildlife and natural processes such as wildfire and spring floods. These interconnected wildlands also need to be buffered from ecologically destructive activities by areas of compatible use-often called stewardship lands-where low-impact farming and forestry work in harmony with surrounding lands rather than against them.

While big wilderness areas are important for many species-including humans-they are crucial for large carnivores such as grizzly bears and wolverines. Wide-roaming predators like wolves and jaguars often play essential roles in regulating the numbers of prey species below them in food chains. Such food chains are woven into complex webs of interaction, and the loss of large carnivores can reverberate through these webs, causing the local disappearance of species and even entire communities. In much of North America, for example, white-tailed deer and raccoons have become overabundant in the absence of their predators, disrupting plant communities and eliminating some kinds of birds and small mammals. Given their ecological significance and need for expansive areas of secure, high-quality habitat, large carnivores are icons for the movement to create wildlands networks throughout the Americas.

How, then, do we turn the need to restore and protect big wilderness areas, accommodate the needs of wide-ranging species such as large predators, and represent the great diversity of North America's natural communities into reality?

The first step is to think big in space and time - to think at the scale of all of North America. Thus our emphasis on four continental-scale "MegaLinkages" that, when implemented, will tie many North American ecosystems together for native species in their natural patterns of range and abundance:

1. Pacific MegaLinkage, along the west coast from Baja California to Alaska;

2. Spine of the Continent MegaLinkage, from Mesoamerica to Alaska through the Rocky Mountains and other ranges;

3. Atlantic MegaLinkage, from Florida to New Brunswick, mostly along the Appalachians;

4. Boreal MegaLinkage, from Alaska to Tthe Canadian Maritimes across the roof of North America.

Each MegaLinkage is comprised of several wildlands network designs, or "WNDs". These science-based conservation plans that use cutting-edge research to identify areas of high biological value for very large regions. A typical wildlands network covers tens of millions of acres, ecologically reconnecting habitat across county, state, and international borders. Several network designs within the Spine of the Continent MegaLinkage (454 k) have been completed and the first network design for the Atlantic MegaLinkage, the greater Northern Appalachians (367k), will be completed in 2005.

The Wildlands Project's network designs plans feature explicit conservation goals, quantitative ecological features or "targets," rigorous methods for locating new reserves to complement existing ones, and explicit criteria for implementing conservation action. Current Wildlands Project methodology integrates three approaches to conservation planning that, in the past, have often been applied separately:

1. Representation of habitats - inclusion of a full spectrum of habitat types (e.g., vegetation, abiotic habitats, aquatic habitats) in protected areas or other areas managed for natural values;

2. Mapping of special elements - identifying and mapping rare species occurrences (and particularly "hotspots" where occurrences are concentrated), watersheds with high biological values, imperiled natural communities, and other sites of high biodiversity value;

3. Modeling of habitat requirements and population viability of focal species - identifying key habitats of wide-ranging species and others of high ecological importance or sensitivity to disturbance by humans. See recent analyses of wolf (526 k), lynx and marten in the Northern Appalachians (1 MB) for examples.

The full Wildlands Project planning process has been condensed into "A Checklist for Wildlands Network Designs". For more scientific details, please see our Scientific Overview white paper.