ABSTRACT:
The landscape of rural America is changing. Wildlife habitats are being conversed to agricultural uses, corridors (linear patches that differ from their surroundings) are removed to expand fields, and urban development spreads across farms, forests, and prairies. The result is a fragmented landscape with fewer, smaller, less-connected patches of wildlife habitat and increasingly-degraded water quality that stresses aquatic ecosystems. The landscape's capacity to sustain a diversity of plant, animal, and aquatic species is declining at an accelerating rate. The loss of biodiversity has become a national concern. Land use planners are increasingly advocating the use of conservation corridors, including riparian buffers, windbreaks/shelterbelts, filter strips, field borders, and grassed waterways to improve water quality and wildlife habitat. Since many of the ecological functions of conservation corridors operate more efficiently at scales larger than an individual corridor, planning at the watershed scale offers the best opportunity to optimize these functions.
Footnotes
Albert C. Henry, Jr., is with the Natural Resources Conservation Service's (NRCS) Watershed Science Institute at North Carolina State University, Raleigh, N.C.; Dennis A. Hosack is with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commision, Raleigh, N. C.; and Craig W. Johnson, Dick Rol, and Gary Bentrup are with the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at Utah State University, Logan, Utah. They acknowledge Dan Good, North Carolina NRCS, for providing Figures 1 and 2.
- Copyright 1999 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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