SEEKING SAFE PASSAGE - Scientists are increasingly discovering the benefits of protecting corridors that connect isolated wildlife habitats

National Wildlife, June-July, 2002 by Jessica Snyder Sachs

LINE AFTER SKINNY LINE of pine trees flicker past the truck window like so many rows of corn, as U.S. Forest Service biologist David Dorman patrols the sandy roads of northern Florida's remote Pinhook Swamp. These fast-growing slash pines, like the spiky saw palmetto weeds matted between them, are native species, notes the scientist. But their regimented and crowded condition is anything but natural-the result of 150 years of logging, draining and machine planting.

A far different landscape emerges as Dorman begins to talk about the long-term future, when restoration of the Pinhook's natural water flow and seasonal fires brings back a "pre-European" ecosystem of blackwater cypress swamp dotted with flatwoods of longleaf pine and burn-resistant grasses. "A hundred years from now, you're going to be able to drop a minnow at the top of the Okefenokee Swamp [60 miles north] and see it swim all the way to me and keep on going," says Dorman.

Such future prospects don't come cheap. In a celebrated buyout last year, nearly 60,000 acres of this 170,000-acre swamp passed from private to public ownership at a cost of $60 million. The rangers of nearby Osceola National Forest will now manage the land with the primary intent of restoring native habitat, switching from a 15- to 20- year cycle of clear-cutting to a 100- to 120-year cycle of selective harvest. Government land managers estimate they need another $116 million to buy the remaining prime timberland from private interests.

The patch-by-patch buyout of the Pinhook Swamp means far more to conservationists, however, than restoration of an isolated habitat. The swamp forms a perfect puzzle piece connecting the even larger wetlands of the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge in southern Georgia with the pine flatwoods and cypress swamps of the Osceola National Forest in northern Florida.

"The acquisition of the Pinhook will give us the largest protected wildlife corridor east of the Mississippi River," says Andrew Schock, director of the National Wildlife Federation's Southeastern Natural Resource Center. "We're especially pleased about the land purchases last year, but there is still a lot of work to be done."

Conservationists have championed the Pinhook as a vital travel route for Osceola's population of Florida black bear, a subspecies that is considered threatened in the Sunshine State. The national forest being too small to sustain them, the bears often wander north through the Pinhook and into the Okefenokee, searching for food and mates while avoiding the towns and highways that hem them in on all other sides.

For his part, Dorman is more excited about connecting populations of less charismatic species, such as the threatened flatwoods salamander and the countless insects, worms and mollusks awaiting discovery in the Pinhook's little-studied ecosystem. "A pine plantation doesn't pose much of an obstacle to a bear that can travel 30 miles in a single night," he explains. "But drain even 100 yards of swamp and you've thrown up a roadblock between populations of amphibians and invertebrates on either side."

Less than 150 miles away, another biologist shares a similar vision as he stands on a sandbar of Georgia's Ocmulgee River. "We have an interesting bottleneck here, in that the wildlife corridor between Georgia's coastal plain and its piedmont runs straight through downtown Macon," says Brian Rood, chair of Environmental Science at nearby Mercer University. Hoping to reestablish this corridor, Rood has thrown his scientific support behind a local plan to establish a 35-mile-long riverbank greenway that would run through the city and connect national wildlife refuges on either side. The project would also create a recreation area for Macon's residents.

At first blush, efforts to save a vast, remote swampland and those to establish an urban recreational greenway would seem to have little in common. Yet both are being championed as vital wildlife "corridors"- among the most widely debated topics in wildlife conservation efforts today. Where once environmental activists concentrated on protecting isolated parcels of prime habitat, a new drive is for "connectivity." Indeed, there is something intuitively appealing about the concept of re-connecting a modern landscape fragmented by urban sprawl and endless highway.

Few places illustrate this fragmentation as well as America's most populous state, California, where last year interest in wildlife corridors drew more than 160 scientists, conservationists and land managers for a one-day mapping marathon. The result: a 100-page atlas and report identifying more than 300 "linkages" needing immediate protection across the state. The findings, published last summer, won the endorsement of California's director of natural resources, who vowed to make the corridors her agency's "top priority." Already, California authorities have spent more than $20 million to acquire the first 2 of 232 identified corridors-one a ranch in the mountains behind San Diego, the other a canyon in Los Angeles.