Conserve, Restore, and Enhance.
Maintaining and enhancing ecological connectivity is key to ensuring a healthy, resilient future for both wildlife and people.
How We Do ItNews
June 2024
Region’s first-ever, transboundary gathering on landscape connectivity a resounding success.
| Learn more about our Landscape Connectivity Summit
How We Achieve Impact
The Staying Connected Initiative (SCI) is an international public-private-academic partnership that works to maintain landscape connectivity across the Northern Appalachian – Acadian Region of the U.S. and Canada. We facilitate a collaborative community of practice along with partner coordination and collaboration at multiple scales, advancing important connectivity work across the region through an integrated, cross-cutting approach consisting of six primary strategies.
The Need
Wildlife are constantly on the move to find food, shelter, and mates, to establish territories, and increasingly, to seek refuge from climate change. The degree to which a landscape facilitates or impedes wildlife movement is what defines the relative connectivity of that landscape.
The Problem
Unfortunately, new development like roads, housing, and industrial infrastructure is fragmenting and degrading the forests, wetlands, and other natural habitats and processes that sustain wildlife and healthy human communities. In the face of increasing habitat loss and fragmentation, it is up to everyone of us to act to maintain and improve the local and regional landscape connections that we all depend on.
Our Approach
That’s why the Staying Connected Initiative takes a collaborative approach to achieving connectivity conservation and restoration. We empower individuals, communities, and organizations across the Northern Appalachian – Acadian Region to deliver effective solutions that promote a healthy, connected landscape for people and wildlife, now and in the future.
The Outcome
The collective achievements of the SCI partnership result in direct benefits for both nature and local communities, including improving the safety of our roads and highways, supporting nature-based economies, and promoting human-wildlife co-existence in ways that allow both to thrive.
Where We Work
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