The Bay Area Critical Linkages Project will develop focal species-based designs
for several priority landscape linkages, implementation strategies, and a monitoring
framework, and will also provide implementation tools to institutionalize support
for a regional network of conserved lands. This comprehensive strategy will be developed
through collaboration among scientists, planners, land and resource management agencies,
wildlife agencies, transportation agencies, conservancies, and landowners.
This project was designed to complement the Bay Area Open Space Council’s Upland
Habitat Goals Project (
http://openspacecouncil.org/programs).
As the Council developed the Upland Habitat Goals Project to identify a network of conservation lands for
biodiversity preservation, it became clear a detailed linkage analysis was needed
but beyond the project’s scope. To address this information gap, the Council and
the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation convened a task force in March 2009 to explore
the need and feasibility of identifying and protecting critical linkages within
the San Francisco Bay Area ecoregion and connections to adjacent ecoregions. The
task force identified several proposed linkage planning areas that could be irretrievably
compromised by development projects in the next decade unless immediate conservation
actions occur. The Critical Linkages project will fine tune the Upland Habitat Goals
conservation lands network to insure functional habitat connectivity at a regional
scale. This large wildland network will serve as the backbone of a regional conservation
strategy.