Locating Conservation Priorities with GIS

American Wildlands has been working on wildlife connectivity issues in the U.S. Northern Rockies for over a decade, and in so doing, strives to assemble the best available science to direct, inform, and fuel our advocacy work by identifying the where, what, when and how of land, water and wildlife conservation.

Click on the map to expand.

To that end, American Wildlands was the first group to pioneer the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) satellite mapping in the West, both literally and figuratively, putting wildlife corridors on the map. In 1995, AWL scientists Dr. Lance Craighead and Rich Walker created a least cost path GIS model to identify over 100 potential wildlife corridors in the Northern Rockies.


During this 5-year effort our organization derived a scientific method for identifying and prioritizing those critical wildlife corridors that need protection between the regions three major ecosystems: the Greater Yellowstone, Northern Continental Divide, and Salmon-Selway. The results were the identification of seven regional corridors that represent the safest potential routes for wildlife to travel from one core area to another throughout the U.S. Northern Rockies region. You can expand the corridors model by clicking on the map above.

Science-fueled Conservation at two Scales

This corridors model informs and prioritizes many aspects of our on-the-ground conservation work throughout the Northern Rockies. We use this information to address habitat connectivity at two primary scales:

1)The regional scale (as is highlighted by our seven regional corridors)

2)and at a more localized “landscape” level(addressing the needs of wildlife to be able to move about within these corridors).

At the regional level our work guides and influences federal land and state wildlife agencies’ management addressing the needs of the more wide-ranging species (such as grizzly bears, wolves and cougars). At the landscape level, we commit to multi-year, multi-faceted investments to organize local efforts that result in conservation action. At this finer-scale we provide more detailed GIS analyses, maps, and special reports and organize local working groups to safeguard the habitats of these critical landscapes and sub-basins. We also work with local and regional land trusts to encourage private land owners in these corridors to manage their lands in a way that maintains habitat connectivity and wildlife movement.

Re-assessing our model - The Priority Linkage Assessment

It has now been more than ten years since American Wildlands originally put wildlife movement corridors on the map in the U.S. Northern Rockies. It is now time to re-assess the key wildlife corridors within each of our seven regional Corridors of Life – a major project for 2007. Once completed, we will use these updated analyses to inform and prioritize where to focus future on-the-ground conservation projects, as well as to encourage other NGOs and agencies to address the threats and opportunities American Wildlands cannot tackle alone. Learn more about this Priority Linkage Assessment.