The Future of Landscape Conservation

Abstract

The future of biodiversity conservation depends on efforts applied across large landscapes, the scale at which many key ecological and evolutionary processes take place. Because the seeds of the National Park system were sown in the United States over 130 years ago, conservation practitioners have increasingly demonstrated that critical conservation goals—including responsiveness to climate change and representation of species, ecosystems, and habitats—can be achieved only if protected areas are functionally connected and embedded within larger, permeable landscapes (Trombulak and Baldwin 2010).