Can animal habitat be preserved by corridors?
Environmental corridors — tracts of land that allow animals to move between habitat areas — are often employed to reduce the environmental impacts on an area to be developed. The thought that even when animals’ habitats are severely fragmented, corridors will still enable them to utilize all of what remains has been held to be based on the principles of conservation biology, but Susan Harrison, associate professor of environmental studies at UC Davis, says that this may not be so. She has looked at a number of national forest management plans in which large percentages of old-growth forest are slated to be cut down. The proposals claim that it is acceptable to cut large numbers of trees, as long as the areas that remain are connected to one another. Harrison says this assumption is not based on hard evidence; there are no experiments to test the viability of corridors, such as fragmenting the landscape and comparing species survival to unfragmented landscape. Harrison has looked at m
