Wildlife corridors are passages that allow regular travel, seasonal migration or population dispersal of different species. Barriers to this basic need – including roads, development and habitat shifts due to climate change– are a threat to healthy wildlife populations. As corridors disappear, so do wildlife.
Wildlife corridors are as diverse as the species using them. For some species, such as pronghorn antelope, elk and deer, corridors are linear routes across the landscape connecting vast and plentiful summer ranges to the safety and protection offered by winter ranges.
While the size and shape of wildlife corridors vary greatly across species and geographies, all corridors have one key feature in common. Corridors connect Cores, or intact habitats that are essential for wildlife during different phases of the year or their lives. Corridors are Earth’s circulatory system, enabling the pulse of animal life and movement to flow among core areas of natural habitat which are essential to the survival of life on Earth. Without corridors, wildlife lose the freedom to roam.
Even for species that do not seasonally migrate, the ability to find new mates in new places protects genetic health and diversity. What happens when habitats are isolated by cities and highways, or fragmented by fences and fields?
Since the 1960s, conservation biologists have been able to measure with increasing accuracy the minimum sizes of protected areas needed to ensure the long-term survival of all the species in a given ecozone. No surprise: Big animals need big spaces. If territories are balkanized by highways, energy development and housing, the long-term survival of large mammals – as well as the multitude of smaller creatures connected to them – is jeopardized.
Climate Change and Wildlife Corridors
What happens when habitats change because of climate change? What happens when species are marooned in isolated islands of shifting habitat? Many of us followed recent reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – (2007) the most exhaustive and authoritative studies to date on the likely effects of global warming. If animals remain trapped in their habitats, the IPCC predicted, one-quarter of the earth’s plants and animals could disappear by the end of this century. Nothing like that has happened on this planet since the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. It can be argued convincingly that nothing of this magnitude has challenged our own species in our relatively short history on this planet.
