Wildlife corridors - more hope than ecological reality

One of the fundamental challenges confronting ecologists and wildlife conservators is finding an acceptable balance between preservation of natural habitat versus the intrusion of human activity usually related to economic and development objectives. The answer, it has seemed, lies with the creation of wildlife corridors which enables isolated ecosystems to be linked by 'corridors' of under-developed or undeveloped tracts of land/forest/bush. The theory is based on the idea that wild animals will move through the corridors and interbreed with other threatened populations of the same species and thus make threatened groups more resilient. How much evidence exists however that this process actually works ? In reality the evidence is thin and limited. For example. in the Brazilian Amazon, the corridors are only required by law to be 60 metres in width yet studies of birds and animals in the region found that a width of 400 metres was required. As a result, there has been no success with the corridors as they currently exist.

The seven coutnries of Central America and Mexico have all agreed to join together the many small protected areas in their borders to form the MesoAmerican Biological Corridor. Unless there is considerable more knowledge and data on optimum corridor size and biological diversity, it's unlikely this initiative will succeed.