🏵️ Habitat Connectivity
Activities
Camino do Guaraú Eco-Tourism Trail
The 110-kilometer trail starts not by coincidence at Sinal do Vale. By curating this officially recognized Camino do Guaraú, Sinal do Vale galvanized entrepreneurs, activists, change makers, and farmers to join the regeneration movement. The trail reconnects the local community to its heritage, culture, and ecotourism potential. The trail continues through nine other segments in the beautiful mountain range of the Mata Atlântica. In each segment, Sinal do Vale has identified areas that need reforestation or conservation to create an agroecological belt to preserve and regenerate the biodiversity in the region. Not least among the species they're working to protect: the golden lion tamarin monkeys, an endangered species that depends on the health of this ecosystem. This work is about creating connected corridors of life, ensuring that the fragments of the Mata Atlântica can support the full diversity of life they once sustained.
Tapere: Planning Rooted in Ancestral Boundaries
Tapere builds hyper-local plans aligned with Māori tapere land units—not imported grid lines. Reconnecting Northland supports hapū and whānau to state restoration goals that match culture and geography. Wānanga, story, and mapping invite communities to picture thriving ancestral estates. Visions then steer practical work—planting, stream repair, nature-based enterprise—through a shared cultural lens, with connectivity and corridors treated as landscape-scale outcomes.
Decolonizing Human-Wildlife Conflicts
Conflict-reduction programmes often lean on technical packages while understating long-standing Maasai practices. In MIKIA’s documentation, fence-heavy conservation has blocked elephant corridors, concentrated animals and people, and raised rather than lowered incidents. When Indigenous knowledge is sidelined, communities may be pushed toward lethal or noisy deterrents instead of approaches grounded in landscape relationships.
Sustainable Grassland Management
Open habitats cannot be sustained with uniform, industrial mowing. Historically, mosaic grazing and scythe work moved slowly across small parcels—patterns that modern large-field management erases along with specialist species. Bringing animals, shepherds, and patchwise grazing back is central. The team advises and trains farmers on these methods. Reception has shifted from scepticism to curiosity: neighbours now seek them out, reporting clear gains in visible biodiversity.
Network Naturregion Building
Many high-value patches sit isolated—a poor recipe for persistence. “Orphan” greens—verges, corporate lawns, small parks—can still host diversity if managed intentionally. The association coordinates Network Naturregion: people networking places—municipalities, schools, kindergartens, clubs, students, farmers, hunters, firms, and staff—so fragments link into something closer to a functional habitat network.
Riparian Watershed Recovery
Salmon offered a practical entry: a ready stakeholder base and steep declines—a pattern across Scotland, not only the Findhorn. The Riverwoods push on riparian woodland then connected salmon recovery to climate and woodland restoration for anglers, landowners, and conservation interests. Work extends beyond narrow riparian strips toward healthier, biodiverse catchment landscapes. Flood risk matters as much as cooler, cleaner water, so “climate-resilient rivers” sit alongside habitat goals. Carbon storage is pursued from eroding headwaters to salt marsh and seagrass in Findhorn Bay. Nature Recovery is watershed-wide: native species, invasive control, coastal carbon habitats. Fieldwork has included seedling and peat surveys, seagrass mapping, and new records of freshwater pearl mussels.
Savory Hub Initiative
The Savory Hub work targets 380,000 regional cattle hectares. Farmers who dedicate 15–30% as corridors can sharply raise returns while giving land back to wild connectivity. Large forest patches (over 500 hectares) anchor the map; farms stitch between them. A 40-year initiative with Replanet began at 30,000 hectares with room to grow toward two- to three-hundred thousand hectares via carbon markets, aiming for broad “360” benefits—farm income, carbon, water, and roughly a third of the landscape supporting nature. Regeneration draws on Lacandon practices with balsa and mulch rather than planting full-sun timber rows; it accelerates processes that fit local biology. Insect monitoring showed fivefold insect population gains, with beneficial species dominating pests—work neighbors first read as “crazy.” Bats—about half of local mammal species—signal ecosystem integrity.
Healthy Landscape Strategy
Carolinian Canada's Healthy Landscape Strategy aims to grow Canada's Biggest Wildlife Garden connecting Toronto to Windsor with healthy habitat. The strategy is informed by ecologist Doug Tallamy's research demonstrating the ways in which native plants support greater insect populations, biodiversity, and landscape health than non-native plants. The Healthy Landscape Strategy includes four key activities, linking restoration and conservation priorities based on the latest local and global science: 1. Save local nature: Increase commitment to saving habitat with long-term agreements. 2. Steward healthy landscapes: Use best ecosystem practices to increase habitat quality. 3. Seed, grow, create, or restore high-quality habitat: Use native plants sourced locally, ecologically, and ethically to increase habitat quantity and connections. 4. Lead healthy resilient communities: Connect communities to nature through strong equitable collaboration, positive engagement, First Nations leadership, and an ethical, local native plant industry. Support a climate-smart, green economy for thriving local communities through cross-sector collaboration. Native plants hold cultural and relational significance to many Indigenous peoples who view native plants as relatives and friends, not commodities. As the demand for native plants increases, part of Carolinian Canada's strategy is to ensure an ethical seed strategy for native plants within the region.
River Ericht Catchment Restoration
The Ericht is among Europe’s most important Atlantic salmon spawning systems. Restoration finance nationally falls short of need; new policy instruments are appearing, and this project is testing how to operate in that shifting policy and funding terrain. Work includes woodland and peatland restoration, with salmon survival as the narrative anchor: as one participant put it, many doubt salmon can persist—“but we’re going to do our best to see what we can do.” Habitat repair is treated as the decisive lever for keeping salmon in these rivers.
Natural Ecosystems Restoration
Restoration focuses on natural areas and how they connect to working farmland. On priority sites such as La Muela, partners work to recover vegetation, soils, and water retention. On farms, agreements identify where to restore natural zones alongside production, with measures to hold water and soil and to build biodiversity. Corridor initiatives extend habitat connectivity so natural patches and productive land form a coherent mosaic.
Landscape-Scale Restoration Projects
The Alliance has adopted 11 community-focused projects that cover more than 15% of Scotland's rainforest zone, with more coming soon. These projects include Beò Airceig (an ambitious 30,000-ha collaboration between the community and landowners in the glens surrounding Loch Arkaig), Appin Rainforest Regeneration (created by the local community development trust to deliver economic, social and environmental benefits), and Loch Lomond Rainforest Project(aiming to deliver both habitat restoration and an education programme for locals and visitors). The projects are helping to tackle some of the big issues, such as deer management, invasive non-native species, job creation and even cultural regeneration through folk festivals!