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The quality and quantity of our Nation’s conservation corridors have declined for the last several decades. Natural corridors are frequently squeezed by adjacent land uses or severed by roads, utilities, dams, or other types of human development. Narrow and segmented corridors are less effective as travel lanes for wildlife dispersal and other ecological functions. Hundreds of miles of fence rows, windbreaks, and other planted corridors are removed annually to accommodate changing agricultural practices and suburban sprawl.

How corridors are arranged and connected within the larger landscape context determine their wildlife value. This principle provides land managers with a tool to manage wildlife species diversity effectively. The cumulative effect of corridor arrangement influences wildlife population dynamics. Designing corridor systems is a task of creating strategic configurations across ownerships and land uses. The objective is to restore targeted ecological functions at watershed scales.

 

The material in the Handbook provides the conservationist with:

• a review of the causes and consequences of habitat fragmentation,
• an overview of the types and ecological functions of corridors,
• a summary of the benefits corridors provide landowners, communities, and the environment,
• watershed-scale wildlife corridor planning principles,
• examples and case studies documenting the importance of planning systems of conservation corridors for wildlife at watershed scales, and
• illustrations and case studies showing how an individual farm, ranch, or community conservation corridor project can be knitted into an areawide plan.

The Handbook can be downloaded as one 16.5MB file here, or piecemeal by chapter here

Case Study: Hedgerow Farms (page 613-129)

 

The case study illustrates how a private landowner partnering with federal, state and local agencies and groups can develop an effective conservation plan at the farm or ranch scale. Conservation corridors form the essence of the plan and function both as habitat and conduit for the 110 species that have been recorded on the property. Hedgerow Farms is also a teaching and research facility for farmers and ranchers in the region.

 

The owners of Hedgerow Farms have developed and demonstrated the use of on-farm vegetation practices that completely reverse the concept of 'clearn farming.' Rather than eliminating vegetation, they have restored and cultivated native California vegetation on roadsides, irrigation canals, drainage ditches, field borders, and along a natural riparian corridor. Every non-farmed area is a complex of native plants (including perennial grasses, sedges, rushes, forbs, shrubs, vines and tress) competitively suppressing invasive weeds while providing a biologically diverse community of plants and animals.

Corridors are only one piece of the conservation puzzle. The other important pieces are the various land management practices applied by farmers, ranchers, and communities to the natural resources on their land. The long-term value of corridors is highly dependent on the health of the adjacent landscape and large patches of native vegetation.