Written by David Johnson
When wildlife is on the move – as they often are – creating corridors for safe passage becomes a crucial criterion for conservation opportunities.
You’re a Blanding’s turtle. You’ve got a nice system of streams, wetlands and uplands that you like to call home. Life is simple. Sure, there’s the occasional raccoon or skunk that tries to turn you into a delicious pre-packaged meal, but a quick retraction of the lobes of your hinged plastron is often good enough to keep the forest’s rapscallions at bay.
Other than that, it’s the usual: rooting around for small crustaceans and aquatic insects, and burrowing into the mud in the fall to stay out of the cold. All in all, not a bad way to spend 90 or so years on this planet.
But then, one day, you look around your habitat and come to a realization: it’s time to move.
Wildlife corridors: the zig-zag routes that grant animals the passage they need to move between habitats. But in a world of interstates, rural highways, overpasses, culverts, and cul-de-sacs, a standard migration can quickly turn into a high-risk proposition.
“It’s all about identifying the connection between habitat areas,” says Peter Steckler, GIS and Conservation Project Manager for The Nature Conservancy in New Hampshire. “It’s not as simple as finding the only green space as a thread connecting these areas. Our wildlife don’t have GPS or roadmaps. They are instinctively following habitat features.”
The risk for these animals-in-transit is when the habitat path suddenly feeds into a roadway with cars rocketing at 75mph and life turns into a real-world game of Frogger – with potentially disastrous consequences.
Even for wildlife with a keener sense of self-preservation – the bobcat for example, which has a home range at the lower end of approximately 10 square miles – impasses to travel corridors still pose existential problems. A bobcat may not chance the 50-yard dash across I-93 or turn back when it hears a barking dog at a nearby housing development, but its failure to leave its current habitat can have detrimental, cascading effects on both its life cycle and the ecosystem as a whole.
All of a sudden there is no way for a new bobcat population to establish itself, the bobcat’s offspring stay put, inbreeding takes over and genetic diversity plummets, and with that the species will lose its resilience and ability to adapt to outside threats like pathogens and changes in climate.
Taken in the context of broader land conservation efforts, creating or preserving these wildlife corridors is particularly critical. The nature of conservation – especially in more-developed areas like the New Hampshire Greater Seacoast region – can lend itself to a more fragmented approach; which makes sense, as you can only conserve the lands that are available to conserve and not all parcels are contiguous to allow for wildlife connectivity.
“That is the challenge,” Peter says. “How to conserve areas that wildlife will use and that are still available to conserve. What we’re trying to avoid is having all these high priority conservation projects be a series of isolated islands.”
In that respect, land trusts like SELT and other conservation organizations must often look at their easements and ownerships as a complex game of eco-Tetris. How can you creatively work to connect conserved lands? It cannot all be done through conservation and easements. Ideally, landowners and developers will work with local communities to design projects that keep these critical remaining wildlife corridors intact.
Pinpointing these linkages is a key factor in evaluating future SELT projects; and you don’t have to look further than SELT’s grand, illuminating vision of the Pawtuckaway to Great Bay Greenway, a sprawling conservation corridor that would connect two of the most important bodies of water in the Seacoast region – Pawtuckaway Lake and Great Bay. Wildlife protection and connectivity are major criteria for this – and other – SELT projects.
When this vision comes to fruition, parcel by parcel, the Greenway will create more than just wildlife corridors; there will be outdoor recreation opportunities as well as increased protection for water that feeds public drinking water reservoirs and drainage to Great Bay. And keeping habitats healthy and diverse will have far-reaching benefits to the investment value of the conserved lands.
“SELT, other conservation organizations, and the towns have done a great job conserving large areas of wildlife habitat in our region,” says Duane Hyde, Land Conservation Director for SELT. “But, to avoid these areas becoming biological islands, we need to act now to ensure there are habitat linkages for species to move between.”
SELT recently contributed to an expansive study from The Nature Conservancy, headed by Peter Steckler. The Connect the Coast study used advanced modeling techniques to identify the high-value lands that can serve as connection points for wildlife across the Piscataqua-Salmon Falls watershed and extending out into adjacent watersheds in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine.
The study offers valuable insight that can aid future conservation projects for SELT and other organizations looking to piece together these connectivity opportunities.
“Following the recommendations of Connect the Coast will help give us the opportunity for future generations to continue to see a diversity of wildlife,” Duane says. “Sightings of and observing wildlife bring so much joy to both young and old and help remind us of what a special place New Hampshire is to live for both people and nature.”
SELT, The Nature Conservancy, and Bear-Paw Regional Greenways are cooperatively working to conserve habitat for Blanding’s, wood, and spotted turtles. This work, including outreach to landowners with land identified by the Connect the Coast study, is supported in part by a grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and the US Natural Resources Conservation Service Working Lands for Wildlife initiative. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the US Department of Agriculture.