Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
tected
lowland forests declined by more than 56 percent. Even uninhabited
frontier parks like Gunung Palung National Park in West Kalimantan were
almost completely logged to meet timber demands (Curran et al. 2004).
Because of their fixed political boundaries, parks and protected areas
strategies also have the potential to predestine systems to other forms of ex-
tinction debt because of a failure to consider landscape dynamics (Carroll
et al. 2004). Specifically, development of the land base between parks in-
creasingly isolates the parks themselves. From a landscape dynamic perspec-
tive, parks effectively represent isolated fragments of the original, larger
habitat. Our consideration of species-area relationships in chapter 6 taught
us that fragments can support only a fraction of the species supported by
intact habitat. Moreover, development within the land matrix between the
fragments makes it difficult for species to migrate and recolonize those frag-
ments in which species have gone extinct.That is, there is no possibility to
“rescue” species that go extinct within the park. Isolating parks thus can pre-
cipitate chronic extinctions (Newmark 1984).
In addition, parks may fall short if there is a failure to align legal and bi-
otic boundaries (Newmark 1985; Caroll et al. 2004). A case example is Al-
gonquin Park in central Ontario, Canada, a place that is highly revered for
its population of wolves, moose, and white-tailed deer. The name itself
harkens back to an age when native Indians occupied the landscape; hence
the park symbolizes primordial wilderness.The region was the inspiration
for an important impressionistic art movement—the Canadian Group of
Seven—that portrayed natural landscapes in their raw glory and thereby
forged an indelible and important Canadian wilderness identity. In the
1800s, loggers harvested the vast stands of white pine (
Pinus strobus
) trees
in this area to feed the high demand of an expanding British economy.Al-
gonquin Park was created in 1893 to establish a wildlife sanctuary and by
excluding agriculture on harvested land to protect the headwaters of the
five major rivers that flow from the park. But, humans have been permit-
ted to transform the landscape around the park into agricultural lands.This
is where the problem begins.
During fall, white-tailed deer migrate out of the park to over-winter in
the surrounding agricultural land matrix.They return to the park in spring
and spend the summer there (Forbes and Theberge 1996).Wolves naturally
follow their prey's seasonal migration. But, wolves are shot with impunity
once outside the park boundary because humans believe that they are a
threat to their livestock and competitors for deer, which they also hunt
