First-of-its-kind report identifies areas critical to survival of California wildlife
Paul Spitler at (530) 758-0380
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 13, 2001
SACRAMENTO—Wildlife is on the ropes in the Golden State.
From the forested mountains and grasslands of California's northwest to the sand dunes,
chaparral, and deserts of the southeast, habitat corridors—areas linking the places where
wild things live—are being destroyed at a terrible rate.
According to a new report, fully 59 percent of the wildlife corridors in the state are
threatened.
Scientists believe that without migration corridors allowing animals to move between
protected areas and other public lands, Californians risk losing some of the most
important and charismatic species found in the state—mountain lions, bobcats, badgers,
salmon and steelhead, to name a few.
Now, the first step in saving those threatened wildlife corridors—identifying
exactly where they are—has been completed, in the form of a 79-page report,
Missing Linkages: Restoring Connectivity to the California Landscape. The entire
report, including detailed color maps of California’s nine ecoregions, is available
on the World Wide Web, at: http://www.calwild.org/resources/pubs/linkages/index.htm
"Despite a growing body of scientific evidence that wildlife corridors are critical to
preventing the extinction of some of our best-known species, we have known very little
about the locations of those corridors—until now," said Paul Spitler, executive director of
the California Wilderness Coalition, one of the report’s sponsors.
"This report is the first step for making wildlife corridors a central component of the
state's conservation strategy," Spitler said.
"We will be urging the governor and lawmakers to undertake a major effort to identify,
study, and protect wildlife corridors through purchase and conservation easements."
Spitler said the Missing Linkages report is the first-ever statewide analysis of migration
corridors in California. "It is the ‘missing link’ for a complete conservation strategy. This
is the best information available at this time on restoring and maintaining habitat
connectivity."
Other sponsors of Missing Linkages include: The Nature Conservancy; the Biological
Resources Division of the United States Geological Survey; the Center for Reproduction
of Endangered Species; and California State Parks.
Last November, more than 160 scientists, conservationists and land use professionals met
at the San Diego Zoo, with the goal of identifying—for the first time ever—the state's
most important wildlife corridors. In April, many of the same scientists wrote to Gov.
Gray Davis, warning that "unless we act now to protect these corridors, our efforts to save much of
California’s native wildlife will likely fail."
In November’s symposium at the San Diego Zoo, scientists identified fragmentation of
wildlife habitats throughout the state as an enormous threat to conservation.
California ecoregions examined in the report are: the North Coast; Bay Area; Central
Coast; South Coast; Central Valley; Modoc Plateau and Cascades; Sierra Nevada; and
Mojave and Sonoran Deserts.
"This problem is particularly acute in Southern California, a recognized global ‘hotspot’
of biological diversity, with its exceedingly rapid population growth and highly
fragmented natural habitats," the scientists wrote in their follow-up letter to Gov. Davis.
"A large body of field research demonstrates that the cascading effect of losing areadependent
species including top-carnivores (mountain lions, bobcats, and badgers) and
anadromous fish (salmon and steelhead)—animals dependant on intact habitat linkages—
from regions of the state will result in the loss of a large proportion of California’s native
biological diversity over time.
"These species maintain countless others by ensuring the balance of nature both within
and outside protected areas. Further, the corridors themselves serve as important habitats
for many important and rare species," the scientists wrote.
—30—
|
Just three miles off of Interstate 80, 
