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Photo courtesy of Rod Mondt |
The Wildlands Project, North America
The Wildlands Project is a pioneering attempt to conserve biodiversity on a regional scale. Its goal is to protect and restore North American ecosystems by establishing a network of connected reserves. Current protection efforts -- parks and wildlife refuges -- are too small and too spread out among human-modified landscapes to adequately protect many plant and animal populations. To prevent the wholesale disappearance of species and habitats, entire ecosystems need to be protected. To accomplish this, The Wildlands Project is coordinating a network of conservation professionals, scientists, concerned citizens, and other public groups. The Project assists these regional and local groups in studying and mapping the ecological diversity of their respective bioregion. As this network collects better scientific information and develops realistic conservation plans, the Project will integrate regional plans into a national and then continental strategy. One such regional project is the Headwaters Wilderness Reserves System proposed by RESTORE: The North Woods, which involves forests in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. Another is the ambitious Yellowstone to Yukon (Y2Y) initiative, which may one day connect reserves stretching from the Alaskan Yukon, to Banff National Park in Canada, to Yellowstone. Eventually, this chain of reserves could be linked farther south to the endangered Sky Island mountaintop habitats of the desert Southwest.
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