Building Resilience
Kit Werner, Senior Director of Communications, Natural Lands
Natural Lands has saved more than 135,000 acres of open space since its founding in 1953. It’s an impressive record, but it’s not enough.
For the foreseeable future, our region will be impacted significantly by critical challenges: a changing climate, dramatic species loss, new waves of sprawling development, and a need for more equitable access to the outdoors. While we cannot solve these challenges alone, Natural Lands has the potential to make and inspire meaningful contributions at the local and regional level.
But which challenges are of most concern? Which conservation projects are most important? Where should we focus our resources?
Said Todd Sampsell, vice president of conservation, “Resilient landscapes and human communities are ones that can withstand stressors—big storms, changing weather patterns, floods and drought, loss of habitat—and bounce back quickly after a significant disturbance. Our work saving open space can help build resiliency against these very real and pressing issues. But we must know what to prioritize.”
“We’ve identified some of the major, big-picture concerns impacting our region and begun collecting data to analyze using mapping software,” said Todd. “We’ve queried individual data sets: Which parts of our region are most susceptible to flooding? Where are the important migration corridors and contiguous forests to support at-risk wildlife species? Where is development pressure the greatest? Where can we prevent stream impairment to improve water quality? Where are the population centers and heat islands? And we’ve asked: How can saving open space best combat these stresses?”
By mapping the answers to each of these questions using existing data, Natural Lands has identified places in the region where stressors and conservation priorities overlap. These overlapping locations are where our conservation work can make the biggest impact—effectively, a blueprint for our future land protection efforts. This is an ongoing effort, and staff will continue to refine the data analysis and our approach as new information becomes available.
Here’s a closer look at the issues and parameters Todd and his team used to develop the new strategic mapping tool that will help chart Natural Lands’ future conservation focus.
Climate Change
Caption: This map shows lands most important for climate resiliency. Highlighted are intact forest landscapes like the Kittatinny Ridge and Poconos as well as Philadelphia coastal and river floodplain areas. Throughout highly developed southeastern Pennsylvania, there are islands of forested areas that present opportunities for parks, open space, and connected greenways.
While polling shows that public opinion still differs on the causes of climate change and how best to address it, we all are facing its impact now. The 10 warmest years on record have all occurred since 2010.
Average annual precipitation in Pennsylvania has increased 5 to 10 percent in the last century. PennDOT reports record-breaking impacts from floods and landslides that have cost more than $125 million in 2018 alone.
How conservation can make a difference:
Conservation and restoration focused on forested buffers, natural floodplains, and wetlands—together with protection of key watershed lands—will help the whole region withstand stronger storms and cycles of high precipitation and drought caused by higher temperatures.
Next Wave of Sprawl
The COVID-19 pandemic has shifted people’s work patterns to enable a remote lifestyle, further escalating “urban flight” to the less-crowded suburbs and undeveloped rural areas. This lifestyle shift is fueling a new wave of sprawl that threatens the best remaining agricultural land in Pennsylvania as well as the rural forested headwaters of the Delaware and Susquehanna River basins.
Sprawl is extending well beyond major urban centers with western Chester County and beyond experiencing development pressure. Warehouse construction along interstate corridors, which in turn fuels growth of nearby housing developments, is gobbling up huge swaths of once-rural land.
Caption: Pike, Monroe, and Carbon Counties face double risk because of their proximity to New York City, which attracts new residents, and their location along interstate highways, which is ideal for warehousing and distribution centers. Weak land use regulations and relatively affordable land make many places targets for sprawling development.
How conservation can make a difference:
Our land protection efforts focus on the most strategic, remaining open spaces in the suburban and rural areas of our region. Natural Lands’ planning services help municipalities ensure a sustainable balance between development and open space protection.
Equitability and Accessibility
Densely populated communities are often hardest hit by the “heat island” effect of climate change and the impacts of stormwater issues and flooding. These communities already suffer from the highest rates of disconnectedness from nature. Other barriers to nature include distance, lack of transportation options, and cultural disconnects for typical open space enjoyment.
Caption: Densely populated neighborhoods are not limited to Philadelphia’s city limits. It’s possible to live in Chester or Berks Counties and still feel disconnected from nature.
How conservation can make a difference:
Increasing opportunities to connect people to nature where they live is a strategic priority. This includes partnering with communities on creating master plans for their parks—such as recent plans for Ash Park in Coatesville, Tacony Creek Park in Philadelphia, and Delco’s New County Park in Broomall—and supporting these plans’ implementation. Additionally, we partner to explore opportunities to promote tree canopy restoration, green stormwater projects, and greenway connections.
Biodiversity and Important Habitats
According to the Center for Biological Diversity, we are currently facing an extinction crisis that is between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than the natural extinction rate. The leading threats include habitat destruction, pollution, the spread of invasive species, climate change, population growth, and other human activities.
Caption: Here we see the most important remaining wildlife habitats and migration corridors in a 100-mile radius around Philadelphia. Not surprisingly, the Kittatinny Ridge and forested areas in the Poconos are prominent habitats in our region. However, other more suburban and urban greenways pop out like Hopewell Big Woods in northern Chester and southern Berks Counties, the Unami Creek greenway in northern Montgomery and into Bucks Counties, and parklands in urban Philadelphia.
How conservation can make a difference:
Identifying and prioritizing protection of the last large, ecologically valuable properties means saving migration corridors and essential habitat for at-risk species. Creating new funding sources is key to saving land; we’ll support new municipal and county spending measures for open space protection.
Water Resources
Our region’s water is under threat from poorly planned development, pollutants, deforestation, and rising sea levels. This includes the Delaware River and the thousands of streams, creeks, and rivers that feed it. This watershed provides drinking water to 15 million people and sustains agriculture and recreation in four states.
It also includes the globally important tidal marshes of southern New Jersey, host to the largest breeding population of horseshoe crabs in the world. Creeks and streams that historically sustained plant and animal life with their fresh water now face saltwater intrusion from rising sea levels.
Caption: This map highlights high-quality and exceptional-value watersheds in eastern Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey. These waterways feed the Delaware and Susquehanna Rivers and, ultimately, the Delaware and Chesapeake Bays.
How conservation can make a difference:
Protecting undeveloped land is the best way to protect water quality. How that land is cared for—such as planting trees along stream edges to filter pollutants and absorb floodwater—is also a critical step to improve water downstream.
A Conservation Blueprint
Now for the fun part. The maps shared here each show the most important areas to protect based on only one criterium. It’s when we look at all the layers together that we can really see where conservation priorities intersect. As projects come to our attention, we can assess them in light of these different map layers and rank them in terms of their resiliency impacts
“I applaud our conservation team’s commitment to data-driven decision making,” said Oliver Bass, president of Natural Lands. “While we won’t be tethered to this new tool, it gives us a science-based blueprint for where we devote our staff time and resources. We look forward to increasing the pace of our land protection—strategically–so that the resilience we’re looking to build becomes reality.”
Natural Lands is dedicated to preserving and nurturing nature’s wonders while creating opportunities for joy and discovery in the outdoors for everyone. As the Greater Philadelphia region’s oldest and largest land conservation organization, Natural Lands—which is member supported—has preserved more than 137,000 acres, including 40+ nature preserves and one public garden totaling more than 23,000 acres. About five million people live within five miles of land under the organization’s protection. Land for life, nature for all. natlands.org.