Wild Lifelines is a new tool from the Wildlands Network for planning broadscale wildlife corridors that connect natural lands in the western United States. The mapping tool emphasizes lands with the least human modification and the greatest connectivity, with layers built of land cover types, distance to roads, traffic volume, housing density and existing natural areas.
The Wild LifeLines pathways help identify the places for conservation priority in order to maintain current linkages for wildlife movement, and also help prioritize areas for restoration. The importance of connectivity preservation projects are growing with the goals of mitigating habitat fragmentation, providing for the dispersal of wide-ranging species, and facilitating adaptation to climate change.
Click here to download a White Paper explaining Wild LifeLines in greater detail. Within the white paper is discussion of several ambitious large landscape conservation initiatives underway in North America, such as Wildlands Network’s Western Wildway Initiative and Eastern Wildway Initiative, the Two Countries One Forest effort, and the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative. These initiatives involve networks of organizations working across political and jurisdictional borders to conserve connected systems of lands. Wild LifeLines hopes to help such initiatives identify which lands to prioritize for protections as well as to visualize connectivity at broad scales.
