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- Info
A general approach to landscape design for wildlife habitat
| Author: |
Lyle, J.T |
| Date: |
1987 |
| Periodical: |
IIn: Adams, L.W.; Leedy, D.L., eds. Integrating Man and Nature in the Metropolitan Environment: Proceedings of the National Symposium on Urban Wildlife; 1986 November 4-7; Chevy Chase, MD. Columbia, MD: National Institute for Urban Wildlife |
| Abstract: |
In recent years, a great deal of effort has gone into establishing a global system of wildlife reserves. The generally accepted goal is to maintain representative samples of the world's major plant and animal communities in a protective status. The work of the biosphere reserves program carried on by Unesco's Man and the Biosphere Project 8 and the Commission on National Parks and Protected Areas of the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) are important initiatives in this direction. Although this is an extremely important effort, indeed one that is essential for maintaining the global gene pool, it is beset by a number of conceptual difficulties. One of these is simply the problem of grouping the world's plant and animal communities. Nature has few sharp dividing lines and any system of grouping is necessarily arbitrary to some degree. There are any number of ways of categorizing biotic communities, but the lines we draw between them are necessarily somewhat fuzzy. The finer the distinctions we make, the larger the number of categories we end up with and the less likely it is that enough reserves can be established to include every community. Conversely, if larger groupings are used, then any number of species that exist on the peripheries of communities are likely to be left out.
And, even if the groupings are large, and the resulting number of communities therefore relatively few, the likelihood of establishing enough permanent reserves in the near future is not great. Even using very coarse categories, such as "tropical humid forests" and "temperate grasslands," IUCN (1980) identified 14 major ecosystem types in the world for which there are either no reserves or inadequate reserves.
Furthermore, even if a full range of reserves can be achieved, they will still include relatively limited areas of land, which will limit the opportunities for speciation to occur. Although the implications of this are little understood, it seems undesirable to limit the diversity of environments in which a community or species occurs and thereby to limit the likelihood of the chance mutation that brings evolutionary change.
For these and other reasons, then, we cannot rely entirely on any system of reserves to maintain the integrity of the global gene pool. Rather, providing suitable conditions. for plant and animal communities is a goal for every landscape everywhere, including urban, suburban, and rural landscapes, and a goal that should be seriously pursued at every level of environmental planning and design. Ideally, every regional plan, urban general plan, and design for a city park or a backyard should include specific provisions for wildlife habitat. To date, this has not been commonly done, except in some instances involving rare or endangered species. If planners and designers are to respond to this challenge, we need to establish some approaches and a broad, useful conceptual basis for planning and design for wildlife. The rest of this paper will present a tentative operational system toward that end.
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