Connecting the Capital Region's Parks: Conservation Corridors Beyond Park Boundaries

The ecosystems that the National Park Service protects in the National Capital Region (NCR) work at scales larger than any single park. Animals and plants need conservation corridors — paths across public and nongovernmental land that improve habitat and let species move as the climate changes and other pressures mount. Keeping those corridors working means parks have to coordinate across their boundaries with their neighbours and with other agencies.

The NCR Landscape Conservation Connections project sets out to find the conservation priorities that the region's national parks share with the agencies, nongovernmental organizations and municipalities that manage the ecologically significant land next to them. It draws on three pieces of work.

RAMS: the condition of park resources

RAMS is a condition assessment of natural resources across the NCR parks, built on data from the region's Inventory and Monitoring network (NCRN). It helps parks weigh management priorities for their most environmentally significant resources at a scale larger than one park, and see how their resources fit into conservation of the wider landscape.

It extends the Natural Resource Condition Assessments already completed for every NCR park, and a series of related regional projects on ecological integrity and natural landscape blocks.

Natural Landscape Blocks: where the landscape is resilient

The NLB project combines three sources — the RAMS condition assessments, the ecological integrity assessments below, and natural vegetation community maps — to estimate landscape resilience. Within each park, ecosystem types were grouped into Natural Landscape Blocks, so that climate adaptation strategies and actions can be prioritized block by block.

Each block's resilience is rated low, medium or high. The rating reflects differences in:

• forest ecological integrity;
• adaptive capacity, as the forest responds to climate and non-climate stressors;
• the surrounding landscape.

Ecological Integrity Assessments: forests done, wetlands under way

EIAs belong to a broader set of climate change assessments for the NCR parks. A landscape's resilience to stress depends on its ecological integrity together with its adaptive capacity and its exposure to climate change.

For the wetlands, the team is gathering the available data and modelling how these ecosystems respond to stressors at two scales:

• watershed and regional — changing patterns of rain and temperature, connectivity;
• the park itself — impermeable surfaces, forest cover, sediment history, stream cutting, water balance, invasive species, deer browsing, fragmentation.

Terms

Sources

Based on "Landscape Conservation Connections in the Capital Region," National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. Links to overview videos, maps and resource briefs that only NPS staff can open, and connectivity maps made with NatureServe, are left out; rewritten in hubnx's own words.