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worth repeating |
Roarke Donnelly of Oglethorpe University spoke on “Managing the Matrix for Native Bird Conservation: Lessons from Seattle and Plans for Atlanta” for the Institute of Ecology last month. Some excerpts: “We need to be fairly cautious when we recommend change, for a few reasons. First, if you apply what I just said throughout the entire region, keeping forest habitat in some zones, that means you’re going to have sprawl, because you can’t develop most of the zones and as developments are pushed out they’re all going to be fairly low density. So you might as well think about where exactly you will allow low density and where you want high density. To me . . . you find areas that are not easily accessible by developers and you make those areas where you allow low density. There are some ways to push development to the edges and not let it go above a particular concentration threshold. “Secondly, if you do this you are going to lose some synanthropic species that are native. We talk about this dichotomy between synanthropic species [species favored by human activity] versus native species, but there are some native species that require some disturbance—they always have. . . . “So these are two reasons not to do the same thing everywhere. . . . “The other thing that I would caution you is this: Seattle is still mostly forested. Atlanta is in a similar situation—a lot of the forest is left. It’s not like New York or Chicago, where most of it has been mowed down. This means that artifacts of pattern that I was handling [in his study] may change. As most of that forest is removed we may see isolation [of habitat areas] becoming greater and greater. So this idea that quantity of habitat is more important than pattern may not hold through time as Seattle develops more and more.” |
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—Beth
Roberts |
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