Planning and Design Principles
Landscapes consist of patches, corridors, and a matrix. These three elements can be arranged in a multitude of ways to define habitats for wildlife that inhabit a landscape. The wildlife planning challenge for the NRCS is the following: Establish and maintain self-sustaining wildlife populations at levels in dynamic equilibrium with the ecological, social, and economic values of the human community; Preserve, enhance, or restore the function and structure of existing patches and corridors; Propose new patches or corridors in appropriate locations to restore lost habitat; Minimize the negative impacts that originate in the matrix; Maximize the positive habitat attributes the matrix provides; Incorporate the other functional benefits that patches and corridors provide; Restore natural disturbance regimes.
Image 1
There’s a focus of creating concepts and principles on the watershed scale with the three basic concepts being: core reserves (nodes), buffer zones, and linkages. The way these concepts are used would be to preserve important nodes (core reserves), provide corridors (linkages) between nodes, and establish multiple uses (buffer zones) around the nodes and corridor. The principles that go along with these concepts are patch, corridor, matrix, and structure. These principles go into more depth in the image on the right.
The way to apply these principles is review the historical pattern of patches and corridors, if available, Study the existing pattern of patches and corridors in the landscape, Identify locations where connectivity is both desirable and feasible, Use the above principles to propose the most efficient means to reconnect the landscape in a way that produces the greatest benefits to wildlife while minimizing the land area taken out of production or suburban development. With these in mind though, there is no set way to design a landscape. Each landscape is unique and the specific conditions from the principles are what should be used when designing a landscape.
