16. Some Ideas and Tools
From Global Examples
• Protected Areas
• Conservation Planning
• Ecological Connectivity
• Species and Scale
• Climate Adaptation
• Social Engagement
• A Landscape Species
17. Congo Basin: > 25 new parks, 75,000 ‘new’ gorillas
Conservation in the Congo Rain Forest
19. The ‘Biological Landscape’
defining the needs of wildlife in time and space
Breeding
Habitat
Preferred
Food
Resource
Dry Season
Refuges
Secondary
Food
Source
20. The ‘Human Landscape’
map human activities in time and space
Totally
Protected
Area
Agricultural Fields
Nation 1
Nation 2
Gold Mines
Hunting
22. The ‘Conservation Landscape’
intersections of human and biological landscapes
identify key threats
Hunting limits access to
refuges & resources
Agriculture affects
breeding habitat
24. Focus Conservation Actions
Minimize demand for bushmeat
Develop alternatives
Better enforcement
Maximize habitat quality
Minimize crop raiding
Connect to other areas
34. Results: 1999 - 2009Results: 1999 - 2009
• USFS designatedUSFS designated
Wildlife CorridorWildlife Corridor
• BLM Gas MoratoriumBLM Gas Moratorium
• Community AgreementsCommunity Agreements
Path of the
Pronghorn
35. • What is the Appropriate
Scale for Wolverine
Conservation Planning ?
• Where Does Wolverine
Habitat Exist at the
Appropriate Scale for
Management ?
Foundations
for Wolverine
Conservation
36. Wolverines in the Western U.S.
I. Island-like Patches of
High-Alpine Habitat
II. Metapopulation that
Requires Dispersal and
Connectivity
56. The Vermejo Statement (Sanderson et al. 2007)
“Over the next century, the ecological recovery of the North
American bison will occur when multiple large herds move freely
across extensive landscapes within all major habitats of their
historic range, interacting in ecologically significant ways with the
fullest possible set of other native species, and inspiring,
sustaining and connecting human cultures.”
Ecological Restoration:
At The Continental Level
57. Ecological Restoration Opportunities
Great Sand Dunes/ Baca
Refuge/ TNC
GSD/Baca/MZR
Priority opportunities
(significant progress)
Prospects
Sanderson et al. 2007.
Conservation Biology
Janos-Hidalgo
Mexico/New Mexico
Alaska
American Prairie
Foundation
Blackfoot IR
Wind River IR
Prince Albert NP, SK
58. Lessons for Bison Ecological Recovery
from Global Experience:
• Build Stakeholders Group
• Acknowledge Challenges
• Seek Common Ground
• Think Big, Start Small
• Act, Monitor, Adapt
Editor's Notes
We live in a richly diverse world…..and protecting that biological diversity is critical to our own future survival
It doesn’t matter where in the world you are or what species you want to conserve….many of the issues are the same and involve human relationships with nature and wildlife.
To save wildlife and wild places we must create both the scientific and social basis for conservation…….
These conflicts come in many forms and involve many animal relationships. Some willdife have sharp teeth and claws
So What can we do…..HOPE…here are some examples to give us some hope and models for the Kainai to draw from.
Conservation of biodiversity is proving more complicated than conservationists once thought. Thus, it is not
surprising that approaches to biodiversity conservation have increased in number, scope, and complexity.
Redford et al 2003…..21 approaches just by 13 conservation NGO’s alone
Justification for wild animal conservation efforts has fallen into two major categories, those based on nature’s intrinsic values
and those based on nature’s utilitarian values (cf. Callicott1997).
We live on a planet in motion. Humans, Animals and even plants are constantly moving across the landscape ………changing, adapting, and interacting with each other and the landscapes where they live----because of this we are learning we need large landscapes and saving protected areas is just not enough. To sustain a world in motion We need large conservation landscapes that are connected by corridors and linkage areas. We need ecological connectivity!!!
What is Ecological Connectivity?
Connectivity is the key property of landscapes that allows wildlife stay in motion…
Like the interstate highway system upon which we humans depend…..wildlife need their own interstate system….a system of corridors between habitats which allow them to move freely across the land to meet biological needs.
Moving across landscapes and between habitats is important for wildlife to access seasonal food resources, find crucial habitats and to seek mates for reproduction.
This Freedom to roam allows wildlife to rear their young in safety and security assuring the next generation of travelers……And….the
movement of individuals between populations also provides the important flow of genes maintaining the genetic health of wildlife populations.
Keeping wildlife in motion assures healthy individuals and populations
Scale is a key characteristic of connectivity…..
Connectivity is a landscape property that operates at many scales…… both great and small…..
It can range from Intercontinental----for Migrating birds like this Bar-tailed Godwit….on of the longest and most complicated intercontinental migrations in the world
According to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment in 2005--- landscapes are undergoing drastic change and biodiversity is threatened by that change.
Most Landscapes around the world are undergoing change due to anthropogenic pressures; which result in habitat loss and fragmentation because of competing interests over land and its primary uses.
As a result of these pressures habitat for many wildlife species is shrinking….fragmenting….into smaller and smaller pieces or even disappearing altogether…..
Many people believe this is the biggest challenge facing wildlife and wildland conservation today
The very nature of working in a world of change and the need for keeping animals motion demands a dynamic and continuous approach to meeting the connectivity challenge
Land-use and disturbance regimes stemming from economic pressures and socio-political agendas provides dynamic and continuous threats-- as well as opportunities.
Aside from saving some large landscapes we will need to managing the matrix….lands between large protected areas…..too create a network of protected areas and habitats……. and that means working with many people with divergent interests and values.
There is an often forgotten-- Non structural component to conservation….like wildlife conflict driven by behviors of animals and man….
This is mostly about managing human behaviors …which is a difficult thing to accomplish and takes continuous effort.
And this contest between man and nature is going to be exacerbated by impending climate change
Climate change affects both humans and wildlife….however humans can modify their environment whereas wildlife must acclimate, adapt or go extinct…..
For wildlife adaptation to climate will mean moving---- in altitude or latitude.
We clearly live in a time of great change…..that is why there is a hugely important social dimension to our conservation efforts..
To adapt to a future climates animals must be able to find new suitable habitats and that requires large scale habitat connectivity.
Each species will vary in its vulnerability to climate change. For example…bison in some form have existed in North America for 100,000’s of years and survived the Pleistocene bottleneck….in its modern form it has existed alongside Native Americans providing services to them for over 12,000 years…The Pika on the other hand lives at the tops of mountains and is thereby very restricted in its ability to adapt to changing climate through altitudinal shifts.
See what’s out there and do something about it
Landscape planning…..working across various jurisdictions and forms of governance.
So our task is to identify the spatial AND TEMPORAL distributions of the resources used by landscape species…
This slide shows the distribution of resources for one species.
As mentioned in the previous slide, we define a landscape that not only provides sufficient security and resources for the population to persist, BUT ALSO to do this so that the landscape species continues fulfilling its ecological roles. These roles could be to create disturbances like in the previous slide or to disperse seeds, or pollinate flowers or possibly in the case of a top predator, to keep prey numbers down. By defining our target as an ECOLOGICALLY FUNCTIONING POPULATION, we’re setting a higher standard than just making sure things don’t go extinct. We’re working to make sure that community and ecosystem-level interactions are also effectively conserved.
We map these activities as well, producing the ‘Human landscape’
And just like we do for willdlife, we’re not just spatially explicit, we’re temporally explicit as well; We keep track of when each of these activities takes place- since that may have important implications on whether or not it leads to a conflict with wildlife.
Habitat destruction and roads create significant changes to the forest….demand to supply wood and other natural products to fuel the growing economy
The critical step is to intersect the ‘human’ and ‘biological’ landscapes to examine the “conservation landscape”.
That allows us to identify specific times, places and land uses that restrict the movement or population growth of our landscape species.
In this example, hunting may limit access to northern dry season refuges or food sources during one part of the year,
while agriculture may affect breeding areas during another…
And just like wildlife, humans respond to landscape structure and condition, whether it’s to go fly fishing, like this fellow, or to collect fuelwood or to grow sweet potatoes.
This leads to specific conservation actions targeted to address these key threats.
Finally I would like talk to you about ecological connectivity as a WCS conservation challenge in North America.
I would like to explore several important questions with you including
What is connectivity?
Why do we care about it?
And,
What is conservationists are doing to meet this important challenge?
Using this incredible science based platform WCS is working hard to maintain or even restore connectivity for wildlife…..Thereby sustaining wildlife into the future as the world we know changes dramatically.
We are enhancing this strong science platform for connectivity conservation through such activities as our best science workshop…… followed by our Science to Policy workshop….where we synthesized the best science practices and provided technical guidance to practicing conservationists trying to meet the connectivity challenge.
Integrating Science to planning and into Policy
We are working at larger scales--- Designing robust assessments, building a policy framework and adapting conservation plans for connectivity
Let me briefly explain some of these initiatives…..
Jon Weaver is evaluating the importance of roadless areas for connectivity in Crown of Continent. Armed with this information we will be able to identify important areas suitable for wilderness designations and forging the last important wilderness connections in this critical ecosystem.
We are working with the Western Governors Association to identify Corridors and Crucial Habitat in Western states….these brave Governors committed to this endeavor in a 2007 Resolution and reaffirmed their commitment to corridors again in 2010. WCS scientists helped bring this initiative to life and are helping States like Montana Idaho, Washington, Arizona develop decision support tools to protect habitats and corridors.
We are supporting the Freedom to Roam campaign as part of a coalition of conservation organizations and business partners engage in conservation activities. This coalition initiative is composed of three Core Programs
Business for Wildlife- which is about bringing business partners to this issue
Witness for Wildlife….Citizen science and Witness Trips
Corridor Commons….a website resource for corridor enthusiasts.
(330, 000 km2. 20Km operation boundary 368, 000 km2)
The Northern Appalachians and Acadian Ecoregion, the boundary which has been defined here by the Nature Conservancy, spans an area of over 330,000 square kilometers, extending from New York State to Nova Scotia. Extending from Tug Hill and the Adirondacks in the west, across the Green Mountains of Vermont and the White Mountains on New Hampshire into Maine and Maritime Canada.
The ecoregion spans the ecological gradient from deciduous to the south to boreal forest in the north, with taiga found in the Gaspé and higher elevations.
This region has a long history of human settlement, human land use and land transformation. Recovering from almost 2 centuries of logging.
This ecoregion not only has a complex ecology it has a complex administrative geography that presents a challenge to conservation.
It is the second-richest ecoregion for vertebrate diversity within the temperate broadleaf and mixed forest regions (Ricketts et al. 1999)
The geographic boundaries of the ecoregion were derived and modified by an international team of scientists from standard ecological land classification frameworks in Canada and the US, coordinated by The Nature Conservancy Eastern Resource Office (Anderson et al. 2006).
The lack of transboundary environmental information is a major limitation to conservation planning and sustainable land use decision making in the Ecoregion.
Monitoring and research to identify the needs of wildlife…..
Ecoregion wide connectivity analysis is underway using FunConn and Corridor Design.
Local corridor planning efforts are underway within individual linkage areas eg. Tug-Hill – Adk, Adk – VT, Green to Sutton Mnts.
Another example of saving connectivity that is specific to migratory needs of Pronghorn. Field research identified the longest antelope migration in N.A……also an ancient one that is over 4000 years old.
Another example with a species that is not necessarily migratory but wide ranging……Wolverine
This map is our prediction of suitable wolverine habitat in the western US. The result of several thousand telemetry locations and a Resource Selection Function analysis. There are 2 take-home points here:
First, the patches of habitat are island-like. And second, most of the islands are small enough, in wolverine terms, that they can hold only a handful of individuals.
For instance, this patch of habitat, the Tobacco Root Mountains in southwest Montana, can hold about 3 resident adults, 1 male and 2 females.
This is critical to understand because it means that wolverines exist as a metapopulation, where young wolverines MUST be able to disperse across arid, privately-owned valley bottoms to move into a mountain range with unrelated individuals so that inbreeding depression does not occur.
Thus connectivity among the major blocks of wolverine habitat, which happens to coincide with a large portion of the publically owned lands across the western US, is absolutely essential to the persistence of this species.
No barriers in nature….but significant challenges from human foot print for this rare and elusive creature.
In fact, some of the most interesting data we have collected are these long distance dispersal movements. For instance, one male recently dispersed over 500 miles between Grand Teton and Rocky Mountain National Parks.
He crossed a number of the barriers that Keith referred to earlier, including Interstate-80 on Memorial Day Weekend. We were excited to follow M56 as he moved toward Colorado, because it would be the first record of a wolverine in that state in nearly a century, but we were also concerned that he might end up squashed on the highway. Fortunately, he had the sense to wait to cross I-80 at 2 o’clock in the morning, when traffic had subsided considerably. He has been in Colorado for over a year now.
to regional as illustrated by this WCS Circuitscape analysis of Wolverines in the High Divide along the Border of Montana and Idaho. Using modern electrical circuit theory scientists can identify important corridors for wolverines moving from one mountain chain to another across a network. Linking important mountain habitats for wolverine is probably the key to the future sustainability of this species.
Bob Inman will talk in a bit more detail about this species and its connectivity needs.
As was mentioned earlier To achieve a lasting connectivity program we must look at connectivity through the lens of climate change.
We know that species are impacted by changing climate across their entire ranges…..so WCS along with California Academy of Sciences is conducting
species Range Modeling to understand and predict the impact of Climate Change on habitats across the range of species like
Armed with this knowledge we can help conservation planners consider long term impacts of land use decisions on the persistence of wildlife and identify climate refuges for species.
Let me share a few examples of how we work on that social as well as scientific dimension across the globe…..
The reasons were obvious
The pressures to destroy Gorillas and wild places where they live come from the social and economic conditions on the landscape…
The solutions then come from improving the social and economic factors that cause this destruction……
Developing a conservation ethos….usually somewhere in the past indigenous people already have the connection to nature so it is really not so hard….just time and education….
Building Capaciity....for local management …..Training and new equipment were needed to address the most immediate threat of poaching.
Economic opportunities through tourism created an economic incentive and provided jobs for indigenous people….who grew to want gorillas again and save their habitat.
96 elephants…..using global social pressure to stop killing and ivory trade.
Using Celebrity power to affect change…..Clinton Global Initiative
You can shape international and national policy for wildlife…..
For my last case I am going to discuss how we might conserve bison….as a landscape species for prairie ecosystems
Conservation is at an important crossroads……Frankly, most of the easy stuff has already been done and the work that remains is going to be much harder. Meeting the challenge of conserving connectivity in landscapes and for biodiversity is severely testing our traditional approaches to conservation and seems to demand a transformation of the theory and practice of conservation. A whole new conservation framework is emerging…….
One thing we know for sure….We will lose the race to conserve nature unless we can establish systematic collaboration among conservation agencies and groups. This cooperation could set the stage for reaching
a consensus about a set of conclusions and metrics for measuring and achieving global conservation. These could then be used to obtain broad societal support for
the conservation mission.