American Wildlands is working to maintain viable habitat connections and vibrant wildlife populations throughout the Northern Rockies region.

The U.S. Northern Rockies

Responding to increasing habitat fragmentation, American Wildlands’ Corridors of Life program is designed to keep large protected areas – the core habitats – connected within the U.S. Northern Rockies. Specifically, AWL fills an important conservation niche through working to restore and maintain the wildlife movement corridors between these protected core habitats for the benefit of wolves, bears, elk, cougars, wolverines and other wide-ranging or migratory animals. We prefer to think of it as linking “the string of pearls” that are our national parks, wilderness and roadless areas, wildlife refuges and other blocks of protected wild country.

To link these pearls together, the Corridors of Life Program utilizes a diverse set of tools, such as promoting the concepts of the three C’s (cores, corridors, and connectivity), distributing information to help guide and influence national, regional and local management policies, and helping to establish and organize working groups of partners and advocates that address site-specific threats and opportunities in the following ways:

1) Using our Corridors science and conservation biology, we influence federal land management agency decision-makers to recognize the importance of habitat connectivity and develop land management plans and projects that assure the protection of the corridors we have identified.

2) With our conservation partners, we lobby Congress for the passage of legislation to institutionalize landscape connectivity and wildlife mitigation in federal policies.

3) We work closely with private land conservationists to prioritize wildlife corridor protection in county growth management plans, zoning, and conservation easements.

4) When appropriate, threats that would destroy a corridor must be stopped via focused litigation.

5) We also work at the place-based level, striving to protect critically important wildlife corridors.

6) To succeed in all of these efforts, we seek out diverse partners, including federal land management agencies, conservation organizations and citizens to develop advocates and public support for initiatives and actions that result in a protected network of interconnected corridors throughout the region.