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The Rewilding Institute’s
EcoWild Program
Additional Info:
Working Group |
Criteria for Ecological Wilderness
An Ecological Approach to the Selection, Design, Prioritization,
Management, and Restoration of Wilderness Areas
Introduction
The Rewilding Institute’s EcoWild Program brings wilderness
conservationists together with conservation biologists to develop
and promote guidelines for Wilderness Area selection, design, and
management based on research from conservation biology.
The National Wilderness Preservation System established in the
United States by the 1964 Wilderness Act is the highest level of
protection for federal lands. Over 106 million acres in more than
600 areas are protected as Wilderness Areas on National Forests,
National Park System units, National Wildlife Refuges, and Bureau
of Land Management lands in over 40 states. Wilderness Areas are
protected from road building, motorized and mechanized vehicles
and equipment, commercial logging, and other activities
destructive to the wild. They are open to a wide variety of
recreational uses, including hiking, canoeing, camping, nature
study, hunting, and fishing.
Wilderness Areas also protect wild Nature—“self-willed land” or
self-regulating ecosystems. The Wilderness Act describes
Wilderness Areas as “areas where the land and its community of
life are untrammeled by man.” However, in a practical way,
recreational and aesthetic values have predominated in the
selection and design of Wilderness Areas.
In 1980, Michael Soulè and Bruce Wilcox recognized that protected
areas were the most important tool for conservation. The new
science of conservation biology, which they helped launch, charged
itself with developing the principles and practices to make
protected areas, including Wilderness Areas, more effective in
protecting all of biological diversity and helping to stop the
extinction crisis.
Guidelines for Protected Area Design
All else being equal:
A. A single large protected
area is better than a single small protected area.
B. A
single large protected area is better than several small
protected areas of the same total acreage.
C. The
presence of large native carnivores is better than their
absence.
D. Intact
habitat is better than artificially fragmented and disturbed
habitat.
E.
Connected protected areas are better than separated protected
areas.
Michael Soulè, APA Journal,
Summer 1991
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Ecological
Guidelines for Wilderness Area Design
Rounded Wilderness Area boundaries are
best because they minimize edge effects, provide more interior
core area for sensitive species, and if left undisturbed can
act as bulwarks against the invasion of exotic species.
It is better to bring
separated Wilderness Area boundaries down to the dividing
road; even better is to close the road and make one contiguous
Wilderness Area.
Cherrystem roads and
developments effectively reduce the size of interior habitat
in Wilderness Areas. It is better to keep them as short as
possible; best to eliminate them.
It is best to connect
nearby Wilderness Areas with wildlife movement linkages than
to leave them isolated.
Graphic by Matt Clark
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A major project for The Rewilding Institute is to develop
science-based, practical guidelines for the selection, design,
prioritization, management, and restoration of Wilderness Areas in
the United States--and comparable areas elsewhere--so that they
better protect the diversity of life. A working group of Rewilding
Institute fellows, including conservation biologists and leaders
in citizen groups such as the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance,
Arizona Wilderness Coalition, and
The Wilderness Society’s
Wilderness Support Center, are preparing such guidelines. They are
also working on a strategy to promote the guidelines to
conservation groups and government land-managing agencies. As
these guidelines are developed, they will be showcased on this
site.
Dave Foreman’s new book, Rewilding North America, discusses an
ecological approach to Wilderness Areas in depth.
Click Here to see
The Rewilding
Institute Criteria for Ecological Wilderness
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