The Northern Appalachian/Acadian ecoregion in eastern North America stretches from New England in the U.S. to maritime Canada. Despite its uniform forested character, the diverse political, cultural, and language differences have historically made ecoregional conservation planning fragmented and ineffective. In 2001, a confederation of conservation NGO’s (Two Countries, One Forest) formed to promote a comprehensive vision for the ecoregion. Its conservation vision emerged from the collaboration of conservation practitioners and academics who formed the 2C1Forest’s Science Work Group. Charged by the organization’s board with identifying locations that were priorities for conservation action based on both current and future needs, this group began an ambitious research agenda that resulted in several products, most of which have since appeared in the peer-reviewed literature.
Results/Conclusions
The products of this research agenda include a spatially explicit map of the region’s Human Footprint; projections of Future Human Footprints under different scenarios of population growth, expansion of the roads network, and patterns of recreational amenities development; irreplaceability analyses; threat vs. importance analyses, and connectivity modeling. These results were central to a multi-million dollar, multi-agency/NGO implementation program. Much work remains to realize the full vision, and future work will focus on improving connectivity analyses to account for projected ecological responses to climate change.
