A landscape linked by a network of wildlife habitat cores, corridors, buffers and linkages. This is the long-range focus of 2C1Forest. Protection of key linkages across this landscape is the immediate focus. Our strategy for realizing success is rooted in the basic principles that guide successful conservation efforts: the proven principles of conservation biology and sound land stewardship.
These well-established principles of conservation biology and sound land stewardship center on the belief that establishment, and maintenance, of well-designed networks of core reserves or protected areas, and matrix lands, is critical to an ecoregion's long-term health, integrity and viability. Core reserves or protected areas can serve to protect plants and animals from process that threaten their existence, and can provide a way to study the impacts of management practices; matrix lands can be managed to allow for maintenance of connections or linkages between core reserves.
Linkages allow for movement of individual plans and animals across a landscape, to maintain healthy populations and genetic diversity. While many of our partners are working to establish new or expanded protected core areas and connectivity between them within the ecoregion, 2C1Forest is designing a targeted campaign aimed at conservation and restoration of the 5 most critically at-risk linkages which, if not maintained, will see the ecoregion segmented into isolated ecological islands.
The 5 priority linkages are: