Explore the conservation megacorridors with this interactive graphic
Editorial: Grizzly crossing
Advertisement
IT ALL started with a wolf named Pluie. One rainy day in the summer of 1991, the 5-year-old female crossed paths with a team of researchers in the in Alberta, Canada. They captured her and fitted a collar and satellite transmitter. For the next two years, they watched in amazement as Pluie went on an epic journey – one that would ultimately inspire a new kind of conservation.
Pluie , spending time with five different packs (see map). In 1993, the signals from her collar ceased, and the battery from the transmitter was eventually found with a bullet hole in it. Nevertheless, Pluie survived for another two years until, in December 1995, a hunter shot her dead, together with her mate and three pups. By then she had covered terrain spread over an area of 100,000 square kilometres.
Wildlife experts knew that wolves and other carnivores sometimes roam across enormous areas in search of food or mates. But Pluie’s travels gave them pause for thought. Banff National Park in Alberta, one of Pluie’s haunts, is regarded as a vast wilderness. Yet she covered an area 15 times as large, and 10 times the size of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. It was clear that preserving these wildernesses, large as they are, would still not be enough to ensure the survival of long-distance travellers like Pluie.
Pluie has been dead for 13 years, but her trek lives on in the minds of conservationists. From Alaska to Australia, they are thinking big. Over the past few years, they have unveiled plans for new conservation areas of mind-boggling scale. Some want wildlife to roam freely from the west coast of Spain to the Carpathian mountains of eastern Europe. Another group envisages a 5000-kilometre-long wildlife thoroughfare that would run from Alaska to Mexico. These big ideas are now starting to take shape on the ground.
“This is not arm-waving fantasy,” says conservationist Harvey Locke, director emeritus of the Wildlands Network in Toronto, Canada. “These are projects with genuine traction. Nature is in dire trouble and we’re not proposing a tiny solution.”
The vision of Locke and his colleagues is to build vast corridors between existing protected areas. They are purchasing land outright wherever possible or making deals with landowners that impose conservation restrictions. Where these approaches aren’t possible, they are working with local people to promote wildlife conservation. Crossings over and under obstacles like highways are also being built. Each individual step is a drop in the ocean – but the hope is that they will add up to something spectacular.
“Conservationists usually react to crises,” says Stephen Trombulak of Middlebury College in Vermont, who is working with a project called , a proposed network of wildlife corridors linking 330,000 square kilometres of land along the east coast of the US and Canada. “We want to be more proactive. We want to say: here is what the future could look like.”
Rhetoric like that has led hundreds of organisations to get involved in the schemes, which are often referred to as “wildlife megacorridors”. Conservationists have long recognised the value of corridors connecting wilderness areas, and mounting evidence shows that they help many species, from red squirrels to butterflies. Megacorridors take the idea to a new scale.
The poster child for the movement is the (Y2Y), which aims to create a 3000-kilometre corridor spanning the US-Canada border that will provide open passage for species from grizzly bears to pine martens. The corridor would be anchored by the legally protected wildernesses of Yellowstone to the south and Yukon in the north. In between lie other wild areas, such as the Banff National Park. However, there is also plenty of human activity to negotiate, from oil and gas drilling to roads that slice through the corridor.
Y2Y’s biggest obstacle is probably Highway 3, a two-lane road that cuts across the proposed corridor just north of the Canadian border. Traffic on the road deters grizzlies and other species from attempting to cross. As a result, bear populations to the south are becoming isolated from the much larger ones north of the road. Genetic analysis has revealed that the 100 or so animals making up one small southern population in the Selkirk mountains are starting to diverge from their northern neighbours, says Michael Proctor, co-director of the in British Columbia. This suggests that Highway 3 is a serious obstacle to grizzly bear movement.
“Highway 3 is the do-or-die line for Y2Y,” says Locke. Yet the road is a major truck route and is not going to be removed. In fact, conservationists expect that it will soon be upgraded to four lanes.
Bear bridges
The solution? Bridges for bears. It may sound odd, but there is evidence that it works. During the 1990s, bridges and underpasses were built across a stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway which cuts through Banff National Park. Tony Clevenger of the Western Transportation Institute at Montana State University in Bozeman has been . “It took the big carnivores four to five years to find the crossings and feel secure using them,” he says. Clevenger has now recorded over 100,000 crossings by 11 species of large mammal, including grizzlies, cougars and elk. That would be the level of movement expected were there no road through the area.
A similar project might allow grizzlies to cross Highway 3. Bridges and underpasses could be built if and when the highway upgrades take place. Y2Y is already working to identify places where grizzlies cross, so that they know where to push for bridges. Last year, the project spent US$225,000 on a plot of land at one crossing point. If they had not intervened, says Locke, the land would have been sold to a trailer park developer.
Independent conservation groups have stepped in to buy other key portions of land in the Y2Y area. For example, The Nature Conservancy and The Trust for Public Land have entered into a $500 million deal to buy 1250 square kilometres of Montana forest linking the Mission mountain and Bob Marshall wilderness areas towards the southern end of Y2Y. The agreement ends fears that the landowner, , would sell to property developers.
The agreement will not, however, lead to the creation of a new wilderness, as harvesting of timber will continue after the land is sold. This might sound like a strange deal for environmental groups to strike, but logging will be tightly controlled and local people will continue to benefit from the money that the work brings in. It is an example of a win-win strategy that is being repeated across all the megacorridor projects.
Explore the conservation megacorridors with this interactive graphic
In a similar deal, Pima county and the Arizona Land and Water Trust (ALWT) recently purchased 20 square kilometres of ranch land in Arizona. The parcel forms a link between two wilderness areas, Las Cienegas National Conservation Area and the Whetstone mountains. Ultimately it could be part of a vast corridor known as the , a huge umbrella project designed to connect several megacorridors, including Y2Y, to form a wildlife linkage stretching from Alaska to Mexico.
The Arizona land is already used by mountain lions and other rare species, but is also a working ranch. Neither ALWT nor the local community wanted the jobs and food it produces to disappear, so the terms of the $21 million deal allow the former owners to stay and work the land. The deeds have also been altered to limit grazing and fence construction and rule out development for housing. Deals like that also come cheaper than purchasing the land outright, which is one reason why ALWT has managed to protect 120 square kilometres since 2000.
Land deals are also a part of the proposed (GMC), a 1300-kilometre swathe of land connecting the Cantabrian mountains in Spain to the Italian Alps via the Pyrenees and Massif Central in France. It might even be extended into the Carpathian mountains of eastern Europe. “It’s not unrealistic to think that in 20 years there could be a good corridor between the Iberian Peninsula and the Balkans,” says Miquel Rafa of Obra Social Caixa Catalunya in Barcelona, Spain, a charitable organisation that is promoting the project.
Some of the land in the proposed corridor is already protected, and Rafa’s aim is to fill in the gaps. Over the past decade, his organisation has spent €8 million buying 80 square kilometres of land between the Cantabrians and the Pyrenees. He estimates that only another 80 square kilometres is needed to complete that part of the corridor.
Wolf reunion
There are already success stories to report. Last year, a wolf from the Cantabrians was spotted in the Pyrenees, not far from one of many packs that arrived there from the French Alps around 10 years ago – the first wolves in the Pyrenees since the 1930s. These packs made a hazardous crossing of the Rhône valley, parts of which are industrialised. It will be remarkable if groups from the Cantabrians and French Alps meet and breed in the Pyrenees, says Rafa, as the populations have been separated for over 800 years. To win local support, Rafa and colleagues have also provided shepherds with Pyrenean mountain dogs, a muscular breed that will defend livestock against wolves.
Ghana Gurung of WWF Nepal has gone a step further in his organisation’s bid to create the , a strip of continuous forest linking existing national parks and wildlife reserves along the . This 50,000-square-kilometre stretch is home to rhinos, tigers, elephants and – unfortunately for those species – 6 million people. Gurung has persuaded farmers to take up a new type of crop – one that will make them money while helping the region’s dwindling wildlife.
Links between some of the protected areas are being eroded as people clear the land to grow food. The problem is compounded by the liking that deer and elephants have shown for traditional crops, and some farmers have started trapping or shooting the animals. To try and solve both problems at once, the WWF has promoted wild mint as an alternative source of income. The plant is not eaten by animals and its oil turns a good profit. “We piloted in areas where there was high crop damage by wildlife, but it was expanded to other areas also because farmers found it much more profitable,” says Gurung.
Meanwhile in Australia, the aims to provide a 2800-kilometre corridor running north-south along the country’s eastern flank, stretching from the Australian Alps in Victoria to northern Queensland.
Megacorridor projects are literally gaining ground all over the world, but each will take decades to create, and there are many threats that could derail them. Nepal’s government supports the Terai Arc Megacorridor, for example, but the country is so politically unstable that there is no guarantee of long-term backing. And despite land purchases in the US, future migration from cities to rural areas could still sever linkages. The Forest Service estimates that around 180,000 square kilometres of US forest land will be sold to developers during the next 30 years, half of it within 15 kilometres of protected forests. There is also the threat of climate change.
These long-term uncertainties mean it may be 50 or even 100 years before the impact of megacorridor projects can be properly judged. Perhaps that is an appropriate timescale for work that aims to reset the balance between humans and nature. It also means that the fate of the projects will lie not only with the ambition and perseverance of their current backers, but also with those the baton is handed to. “There is a need for staying power,” says Locke. “We have to advance our visions proudly and often, then withstand the critics and backlash that any bold idea attracts.”
Explore the conservation megacorridors with this interactive graphic
