Conservation planning is the integration of development planning goals associated with land use, function, circulation, access and cost with existing or desired natural patterns. Often the principles used in conservation planning are not utilized because natural systems are extremely complex and not fully understood. This unpredictability often makes planners, architects, engineers, developers and owners uncomfortable because it runs counter to their perception of what constitutes order. To overcome this hesitancy and obtain buy in, implementation of conservation planning measures should be done incrementally, evaluated, and adjusted over time. Even within the apparent chaos of nature there is a simple hierarchical order to the forest habitat that when understood can be used to form basic principles that can be easily used in the early stages of a project’s design. These principles include:

• Large areas of habitat maintain the largest variety of species.
• Where not possible to preserve large habitats, connected small habitats will help sustain regional diversity.
• Design the shape of a habitat so that it maximizes interior habitat space.
• Avoid fragmenting large patches of natural habitat with paved surfaces.
• Avoid creation and use of isolated habitats.
• Maintain or create corridors of similar vegetation to connect habitats.
• Use continuous corridors of natural vegetation to connect water corridors.
• Creating a variety of habitat types is best.
• Provide transition areas between habitat types.
• Native plant species adapt best to habitat creation and maintenance.

A forest habitat is composed of a core habitat, habitat edge and forest transition zone. There are characteristics of each of these that work together to sustain wildlife and plant species. Maintaining existing habitat patches is more effective than creating new ones. However, in order to connect habitats it is often necessary to create new ones. Existing habitats include bodies of water, buffer zones, special plant communities, rare plant assemblages, geological features, special animal habitats and examples of complete common plant communities such as forests, prairies and dunes.

When designing using conservation principles the size and shape of forest habitat core areas need to be maximized to support interior wildlife habitats. A forest habitat edge extends into the forest at least as far as the height of the trees. Because of this the forest habitat core needs to be a minimum of twice as wide as the height of the trees. Another facet that affects the core is its shape where a long narrow habitat area has less interior core than a circular one.

A forest habitat core must provide adequate food, access to permanent water and shelter for wildlife. It contains four layers of vegetation: canopy trees, understory trees, shrubs and ground covers. For the core to support the maximum number of animals the number of structured layers needs to be maximized. A habitat core should be as large as possible and typically changes gradually as it transitions from the edge to the core. For example a forest transition zone consists of small trees and shrubs before it opens onto grassland. It needs to have a habitat edge that accommodates a habitat for edge species and isolates the habitat core from sounding human activity. The natural habitat edge provides a habitat for a variety of animals that prefer the edges. It is also important for providing a buffer for the core against infiltration of pollutants and human activity.

Habitat cores should fit together both on a specific site and the surrounding region. Each individual animal has a home range with enough space to provide food, shelter and living space. In order to support enough individuals to have a genetically viable population of species, a large habitat must contain thousands of appropriate home ranges. The need to provide large enough home ranges necessitates the need to have habitat core areas with limited home ranges connected to other suitable habitat areas. This is done through the use of habitat corridors that connect similar Habitat cores. These corridors should be composed of the same type of vegetation as the core areas that they are connecting. Due to the lack of available land getting the ideal matching core area and corridors is difficult the goal is to get as close as possible to the ideal.

The same principles that guide localized conservation planning can be applied regionally. This is achieved through looking at the surrounding land beyond the developing site. The idea is to connect a site to other adjacent habitats or to develop a plan for creating a regionally linked green space plan. In so doing you are maintaining existing habitats, improving marginal ones and extending the bio diversity of the region through the implementation of your planning efforts.