Protection sought for 'living landscapes'

CNN -- Some of the world's most important wild landscapes are the focus of a major new conservation project to find more effective ways to protect them.

Some of the most important wild areas left on Earth, including Ndoki-Likouala in the Republic of Congo, the Greater Yellowstone in the U.S. and Mamiraua-Amana in Brazil, are all largely intact ecosystems.

The wildlife living in these areas includes "landscape species," like elephants, tigers and bison -- wide-ranging animals that deeply influence their surroundings, both biologically and culturally.

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These critical wild areas are the basis of a conservation initiative called "Living Landscapes" being developed by the Wildlife Conservation Society based in New York.

"Our ability to do this has been advanced by a visionary gift by Robert Wilson, a $20 million dollar challenge grant to try to address conservation in 50 of the world's wildest and most valuable places," said chief executive officer Steven Sanderson.

Many of these "living landscapes" already contain protected areas but all of them are places of potential conflict between wildlife and humans, where migrations often take animals outside existing parks and reserves to logging, mining or agricultural areas.

In the Living Landscapes initiative, conservationists will focus their work in areas outside parks and reserves, building alliances with local people, governments and the private sector to find a workable balance between the needs of wildlife and humans.

The objective is to reach long-term, sustainable ways for people and wildlife to co-exist together and to save these last wild edens on the planet.

For example, in Ndoki-Likouala the WCS will work with wildlife protection staff, the logging companies that work around the reserves of northern Congo, and local communities to try and reduce the ecological impacts of logging operations, to prohibit the hunting of endangered species and the export of bushmeat and to control logging-related demographic growth and its impacts.