ave you ever visited a national park or wilderness area? Ever crested a rocky ridge and gazed down into a vast river valley sprinkled with green meadows and towering trees, without the faintest glimpse of a highway, house, or shopping plaza on the horizon? We call these special protected areas cores, because they are some of the biggest blocks of dedicated wildlife habitat left on the entire planet. The Northern Rockies has the distinguished privilege of having three of these very large and very important core areas which you can view by clicking the map below:

Click on the map to expand.

But limiting conservation to these large blocks of lands is not enough to sustain viable populations of wildlife. Every species of animal requires a unique combination of environmental conditions in order to survive and reproduce. These factors constitute its 'niche', or in looser terms, its 'habitat'. For most species, the landscape is a sea of habitat islands: areas of good habitat (the cores) which are often surrounded by other areas where making a living is more difficult or impossible.

To travel from one of these core habitat island to another, an animal often has to expose itself to predators, or travel through areas where there is nothing to eat or drink. Increasingly, the landscape is becoming so hostile to certain wildlife species that they have virtually no chance of crossing to another patch of habitat. The results are that wildlife becomes stranded, and unable to move in search of food or mates.

However, in other cases, wildlife are able to find smaller and sparser areas of suitable habitat and resources that sustain them as they wander in search of a new core to live in. We call these area's corridors, or linkages (see glossary), and they are increasingly critical for the future of wildlife in the U.S Northern Rockies.

In order to ensure the long-term health and survival of wildlife populations in the U.S. Northern Rockies, we need to maintain and protect a system of connectivity. Connectivity can be thought of as a web made up of all the cores and corridors within a region that allows wildlife to move across the landscape.

A web of connectivity (such as the model on the left) that links the cores with corridors will ensure that native wildlife are able to migrate and access the wildlands of the Rocky Mountain North as they have done for thousands of years.