PARENT SESSION
Contributed Oral Session 1: Landscape History
Monday, August 8, 8:00 AM - 11:30 AM, Meeting Room 513 A, Level 5, Palais des congrès de Montréal
A regional human footprint for the transboundary Northern Appalachians ecosystem: Quantifying direct human impact on the land from New York State to Nova Scotia.
Woolmer, Gillian1, Trombulak, Steve2, Doran, Patrick*,3, Morgan, Alexis4, Ray, Justina1, Anderson, Mark5, Sanderson, Eric6, 1 WCS Wildlife Conservation Society Canada, Toronto, Ontario, Canada2 Department of Biology, Middlebury, Vermont, USA3 The Wildlands Project, Richmond, Vermont, USA4 World Wildlife Fund, Toronto, Ontario, Canada5 The Nature Conservancy, Boston, MA, USA6 Wildlife Conservation Society-Living Landscapes Program, Bronx, NY
ABSTRACT- There is broad consensus among the conservation community about the importance of human influence on nature. The Northern Appalachians ecoregion that spans the US and Canadian border, is a transitionary region between boreal and temperate forests and is the center of the range for many species and community types. It has one of the longest histories of human development in North America and has suffered significant biological losses as a result. Building upon the global methodology developed the Wildlife Conservation Society and CIESEN (Sanderson et al., 2002), we have mapped the Human Footprint of the Northern Appalachians at a finer scale using higher-resolution spatial datasets. This regional Human Footprint, which seeks to quantify the direct human impact on the land, reveals not only the remaining wildness and potential ecological linkages within the area, but also identifies potential low-cost opportunities for conservation action, priority areas for restoration, as well as hotspots of human development that present barriers to regional connectivity. Until recently, conservation efforts in this ecoregion have been limited to the boundaries of administrative units such as protected area, counties, states or provinces. The Human Footprint provides a tool to facilitate ecosystem-wide, cross-boundary conservation planning and communicate conservation and land management policy that we hope will ensure the ecological integrity of the Northern Appalachians far into the future.
Key words: human footprint, northern appalachians, transboundary conservation, conservation policy