WHEREAS the Northern Rockies region in western Montana, northern Idaho, and northwestern Wyoming is a landscape which has been interconnected by large tracts of forested habitat for thousands of years, and

WHEREAS this forest matrix still is largely intact as evidenced by remote sensing, landcover mapping, and other large scale analyses, and

WHEREAS radio-telemetry data for various wildlife species has demonstrated that forest carnivores and their prey move within portions of this habitat matrix at present, and genetic data indicate that significant gene flow has occurred throughout the region during the past 10,000 years or so, and

WHEREAS forest carnivores, their prey, and other species using this landscape have been demonstrated to avoid areas of human activity and habitat alteration to varying degrees, and such human activities and developments have reduced the amount of habitat available to these sensitive species, and

WHEREAS the unprotected habitat for these species within these ecosystems is continually being removed by human alteration, leaving the possibility of protecting larger single blocks of intact habitat adequate to maintain viable populations of these larger carnivores increasingly improbable, and

WHEREAS current land management activities on Federal lands, and land use practices on private land, are further fragmenting these populations and insularizing the large core reserves in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, and the Salmon-Selway Ecosystem

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that the Society for Conservation Biology affirms that increasing fragmentation of existing wildlife habitat (particularly that of forest carnivores) and increasing isolation of protected reserves is detrimental to the maintenance of biodiversity in the Northern Rockies of Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho.

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the Society supports the maintenance of existing forested habitat linkages in a natural state, and with limited human disturbance, to allow for the possibility of wildlife movement between the large protected core reserves in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, and the Salmon-Selway Ecosystem.