In a publication produced by the North Carolina Environmental Defense, conservation biology experts laid out steps that they thought were necessary for North Carolina to arrive at year 2100 in great ecological shape.  In the publication, they laid out 4 strategies that the Environmental Defense thought were necessary for North Carolina’s beautiful ecosystems to not only persist, but thrive almost a century into the future.

Strategy #1 – Establish a network of optimally located, sufficiently large, well-connected nature preserves, including both lands and maritime preserves, managed explicitly to maintain ecosystem processes and biodiversity.

In order for North Carolina’s – and the rest of North America’s for that matter - ecosystems to thrive into the future,  large, core reserves in the mountains, Piedmont, coastal plan, and tidal zone need to be designated and protected.  In large protected areas, natural fire regimes can be be allowed without significant disturbance to human development, complex predator/prey relationships can be restored, and true wilderness experiences can stretch into future generations. 

Incorporated into the large, contiguous preserves, travel corridors are also an important component.  Travel corridors allow for migration between seasonal habitats for organisms, avenues for genetic exchange and diversity, and provide connectivity for source/sink dynamics.  The publication makes an ironic comment that human travel mechanisms (railroads, highways) are the very thing that contributes most to fragmentation and obstacles to easy animal movement.  Existing corridors need to be protected and future development placed with them in mind. 

Reserves need to be as large as possible for several reasons: species are less likely to go extinct or become threatened in larger areas, larger reserves obviously include more species, enable greater genetic variety, are more resilient to catastrophic events such as natural disasters, provide a refuge to external disturbance, and large charismatic species like black bears and elk are more likely to thrive in the largest areas in a landscape. 

 The publication gets into the specifics of how these strategies can be carried out, but I will spare you the details.  3 more strategies to come…

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