Conservation corridors: a hot topic

We live in an increasingly fragmented world, and that is posing serious problems for wildlife--especially in the face of rising climate change, which can create an imperative for species to move elsewhere.

A possible way to help counter the harmful effects of habitat fragmentation is conservation corridors--linkages between remnant habitats that have been called 'bandages for wounded landscapes'.

Landscape linkages--a conservation corridor in north Queensland, Australia.

This week sees two important developments in corridor research.  The first is a feature by the leading environmental website Mongabay.com of Stuart Pimm's longstanding efforts to use corridors to reconnect fragmented habitats.  Pimm is a global conservation leader and ALERT member.

The second development is an unusually important paper in Nature Climate Change by Patrick Jantz and colleagues that identifies priority areas for conservation corridors in the tropics. The authors assessed thousands of potential corridors between tropical protected areas, and their potential both for aiding biodiversity and for protecting forest carbon stocks.

These are important efforts and show why conservation corridors are a hot topic in both environmental research and practice.