This year, in addition to many other important projects, our Community GIS Services program will be working with the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative (Y2Y) on a transboundary connectivity project in an area known as the Cabinet-Purcells. The Cabinet-Purcell area is a wonderfully lush, interior rainforest region that straddles the United States/Canadian border. The goal of Y2Y’s Cabinet-Purcells Corridor Conservation Project is to maintain and restore habitat connectivity in the Cabinet-Purcell Corridor, focused primarily on the needs of cougars, lynx, mountain goats, woodland caribou, and an isolated population of grizzly in northern Idaho’s Selkirk Mountains.

To help make this happen, Y2Y is collaborating with almost twenty organizations on a region-wide conservation strategy. American Wildlands’ role in this effort is to identify opportunities for restoring and maintaining habitat connectivity within the region, a process that is taking us back to our GIS (Geographic Information Systems) roots. It has been more than ten years since we originally established our GIS Lab to identify the most important wildlife movement corridors throughout the U.S. Northern Rockies. Due to changing land uses during the last decade, it is time to reassess and prioritize which of these “linkages”, or habitat connections, are now most important for American Wildlands and others to focus on.

To that end, American Wildlands has initiated a “priority linkage assessment” for the Cabinet-Purcells—a project we had already planned on conducting, but can now do in concert with other organizations. This process starts with AWL staff interviewing the people who best understand wildlife needs in the region; the expert biologists who work there. Using our maps, these biologists will help locate important linkage areas, as well as identify the threats to, and opportunities for, habitat connectivity in each area. We will use this information to prioritize which local landscapes within the Cabinet- Purcells deserve the most conservation attention in order to maintain habitat connectivity, and what sort of conservation action is needed for each landscape.

And we don’t plan on stopping there. During 2007 and the first half of 2008, we will conduct a similar “priority linkage assessment” in six of our regional corridors. Ultimately, American Wildlands’ goal for these assessments is to not only use our findings in prioritizing our own work, but also to help other conservation organizations, state and federal agencies, and private land owners within the Northern Rockies use this information to inform and guide their conservation efforts.

Recently, the AWL staff and Board made a commitment to seek GIS contracts, as part of our external Community GIS Services program, which complement and support our own internal GIS conservation work. This “priority linkage assessment” is a great step in that direction, and we are excited to use our GIS Lab to add value to both our internal efforts and that of dozens of other NGOs, agencies and individuals throughout the region.