From the Adirondacks to Acadia: A Wildlands Network Design for the Greater Northern Appalachians has just been completed. Nearly four years in the making, the project was headed by Wildlands Project program director Conrad Reining and co-authored with Karen Beazley, Patrick Doran and Charlie Bettigole. The effort benefited from the assistance of a superb group of scientific advisors in the U.S. and Canada, and from dozens of local experts who critiqued the network design through its several stages of development.

Our next steps include:

1. Distributing the document to scientific advisors, those who provided expert input, donors and other members of the conservation community in the Northern Appalachian region.
2. Making several presentations to local conservation groups this fall and winter.
3. Continue finer-scale mapping, stakeholder identification and outreach. In particular, we will be approaching conservationists working in several of the areas that are of particularly high conservation priority. These areas are identified by their biological importance, vulnerability to threats such as road and residential development, and value as wildlife linkages for threatened species like Canada lynx and American marten.
4. Collaborating with other scientists in the region in support of a mapping process. This process will synthesize several scientific efforts, including data and methods used to create our network design, into a refined map identifying core areas and landscape linkages. It will also quantify the threats to each of these identified core and linkage areas. Finally, the integration of “biological importance data” with “threat information” will help prioritize which areas are most in need of conservation from a regional perspective.
5. Begin the process of integrating the Northern Appalachians region into the much larger Appalachians/Atlantic region, in a collaborative effort to develop a vision of connected and protected lands that stretches from the Maritimes of Canada through the southeastern U.S.