Accent on Natural Landscaping

Donna VanBuecken

Search Results for: carrying capacity

Wolf Awareness Week

I missed sharing with you this great video “How Wolves Change Rivers” about the restoration of the natural landscaping in Yellowstone National Park because of the reintroduction of wolves 1995.  The film tells you how the wolves not only transformed the ecosystems, but also the physical geography of the park. Once they changed the mule deer behavior, the forests returned and then the birds and the beavers.  And then the rivers. It’s a fascinating story.  Enjoy!

Wolf Awareness week was October 16-22; the third week in October annually. There are many states besides Wisconsin that promote the research, education and conservation of wolves. But so often people still don’t understand the importance of carrying capacity and the necessity for biodiversity in order to maintain a healthy environment.  This video gives an excellent example of just what mimicing mother nature can do.

More about Yellowstone Park National Park’s wolves.

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Landscape-Scale approach to Mitigation

This is one of the slides from my PPT presentation for our local Hunter Education class. It's a simply graphic, but it shows why landscape-scale mitigation is so important. Photo courtesy of WDNR
This is one of the slides from my PPT presentation for our local Hunter Education class. It’s a simple graphic focused on wildlife, but it shows why landscape-scale mitigation is so important. Graphic courtesy of WDNR. (Click graphic to enlarge.)

Aldo Leopold would be taking a deep breath if he could with the news that the USFWS is enhancing mitigation guidelines to include a landscape-scale approach instead of a project by project approach. This means that reviewing agencies for requests to destroy precious environments with mitigation have now to take into consideration continuing biodiversity for the entire landscape and not just the project.

DOI has for the past several years been trying to get the approach changed, but with President Obama’s recent memo Mitigating Impacts on Natural Resources from Development and Encouraging Related Private Investment, they and other related agencies finally got a big boost toward helping our environment.

Another slide from my Hunter Education PPT. Again, focused on wildlife, carrying capacity also pertains to mankind's livelihood within a biodiversified habitat. Graphic courtesy of WDNR
Another slide from my Hunter Education PPT. Carrying capacity also pertains to mankind’s livelihood within a biodiversified habitat. Graphic courtesy of WDNR. (Click slide to enlarge.)

This means that “the mitigation goal is not necessarily based on habitat area, but on numbers of individuals, size and distribution of populations, the quality and carrying capacity of habitat, or the capacity of the landscape to support stable or increasing populations of the affected species after the action (including all proposed conservation measures) is implemented. In other words, it is based on those factors that determine the ability of the species to be conserved.”

 

Another slide from my Hunter Education PPT. This one shows the various aspects related to wildlife preservation which mirror human habitat as well. Graphic courtesy of WDNR. (Click on the graphic to enlarge.)
Another slide from my Hunter Education PPT. This one shows the various aspects related to wildlife preservation which mirror human habitat as well. Graphic courtesy of WDNR. (Click graphic to enlarge.)

Further, “offsetting impacts to designated or proposed critical habitat through the use of compensatory mitigation should target the maintenance, restoration, or improvement of the recovery support function of the affected critical habitat as described in the relevant biological or conference opinion, conservation or mitigation plan, mitigation instrument, permit, or conference report. Recovery plans, 5-year reviews, proposed and final critical habitat rules, and the best available science on species status, threats, and needs should be relied on to inform the selection of habitat types subject to compensatory mitigation actions for unavoidable adverse impacts to species or critical habitat.”

If you’d like to share your thoughts about this new approach to mitigation go to Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Plants; Endangered Species Act Compensatory Mitigation Policy and submit a formal comment by October 17, 2016.

To read a simpler version of this guideline, go to The Presidential Memorandum and Interior Department Policy on Mitigation: Their Content and Implications by Holland & Hart.

 

 

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Aldo Leopold Weekend/Week

In March 2000, people gathered in Lodi, Wisconsin on the first weekend of March to read Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac cover to cover. Since then the first weekend/week in March has become an international event with people reading A Sand County Almanac along with doing community service projects. This year this event runs March 3 thru 11.

Quoting Buddy Huffaker, Executive Director of the Aldo Leopold Foundation, from a 2014 WPR broadcast on Central Time: “It’s not because he has the answers for us, but that he provokes us to think about the fundamental questions about what our relationship with the natural world is ….We continue to deal with these real challenges…what Leopold called the oldest task in human history: How to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.” [Read more…]