If you haven't heard of that, it is a grassroots effort to map critical habitat and linkages all across North America. These, I think, are going to be the scale of the nature reserves of the future. These big scale projects so far have been primarily conceived by non-government organizations and this probably is due to the fact that government agencies have their mandates for specific uses of land and within specific boundaries and it's hard for them to collaborate on larger issues. However, the U.S. Forest Service and Fish and Wildlife Service have mandated corridor analysis and linkage connections in many of their forest planning and endangered species recovery documents. The Montana Department of Fish Wildlife and Parks has incorporated corridors into game management planning and has actively set up conservation easements on private lands to allow for wildlife movement. The Nature Conservancy is working to connect habitats by purchasing land. But the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee is about the only multi-disciplinary committee that has mentioned this problem and done some analysis of linkage corridors.

Concepts like this are going to require the support and understanding of people that live on the land. This is your job as teachers. You need to think about these things and teach your students how to think on a bigger scale and over longer periods of time than their parents have.

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