The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation today announced a grant of $400,000 over three years to Regional Plan Association for wildlife conservation in the Northeast Megaregion as part of the America 2050 initiative. The funds will be applied to a new project to improve the integration of nature conservation with land use planning and infrastructure investments in 13 states across the Northeast, from Maine to Virginia. This marks the first effort to coordinate regional landscape conservation at the megaregion scale, mirroring similar large-scale efforts focused on transportation planning and advocacy that are underway in the Northeast Megaregion.

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By Frederick Steiner University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture and Robert Yaro, Regional Plan Association

This paper outlines strategies for identifying and protecting the large landscapes that represent the nation's natural, scenic, and historic heritage, beginning with a review of past efforts, and proceeding to suggestions for establishing national priorities for preservation. These strategies are needed in face of estimates that the U.S. will develop more land in the next four decades than we have in the past four centuries. Across the country, national parks are being damaged by over-use and under-maintenance, while some of the most productive agricultural lands in and near metropolitan areas are being fragmented by large lot subdivisions.

This paper is part of a series prepared by America 2050 for the Rockefeller Foundation Global Urban Summit in July 2007.