William V. DeLuca, Ph.D.

Since 2010 I have been one of the principal members of the Designing Sustainable Landscapes Project, which has been funding by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service's North Atlantic Landscape Conservation Cooperative and the USGS Northeast Climate Science Center. The goal of this project is to develop, with guidance from a diverse set of stakeholders, landscape conservation design that preserves 25% of the landscape in the 13 northeastern states. Conservation cores and connectors were selected using an index ecological integrity model, landscape capability models for 31 representative species, and The Nature Conservancy's resiliency model. This process was piloted in the Connecticut River watershed as Connect the Connecticut and then applied to the entire northeast and is known as Nature's Network.