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 It

News

April 2025

Pathways to an ecologically connected transborder landscape: Available now!

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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.

Land Conservation

to protect and steward critical corridors.

Land Use Planning

to guide appropriate development

Transportation & Wildlife Solutions

to make roads safer for people and wildlife.

Conservation Science

to inform action on the ground.

Engagement & Capacity

to build awareness and empower communities.

Policy Development

to promote best practices and solutions.

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

Launch Map

Resources

Browse through valuable resources such as tools, maps, articles, and reports

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