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Need for more complex travel plans for wildlife

      Washington: People designing corridors for wildlife should not opt for simple symmetrical plans, but should rather go for more complex travel plans, according to a new UC Davis study. The study said that people trying to help nature by designing corridors for wildlife should think more naturally. Corridors are physical connections between disconnected fragments of plant and animal habitat. "Human beings tend to think in terms of regular, symmetrical structures, but nature can be much more irregular. We found that symmetrical systems of corridors may actually do less good for natural communities than designs with some randomness or asymmetry built in," said UC Davis postdoctoral researcher Matthew Holland, the study's lead author. A corridor can be as big as a swath of river and forest miles wide that links two national parks, or as small as a tunnel under an interstate highway. Without such connections, animals cannot travel to food, water, mates and shelter; plants cannot disperse their pollen and seeds to maintain healthy, genetically diverse populations. Designing and implementing corridors (sometimes called corridor ecology or connectivity conservation) is a new subfield in environmental science. The new research is among the first to help land managers and community planners designing corridors to know what will work and what will not.
-Oct 21,  2008