Designing Sustainable Landscapes: HUC6 Aquatic Cores and Buffers

The HUC6 aquatic cores and associated buffers represent some of the principal Designing Sustainable Landscapes (DSL) landscape conservation design (LCD) products for aquatic ecosystems and species, and they are best understood in the context of the full LCD process described in detail in the technical document on landscape design (McGarigal et al 2017). These products were initially developed for the Connecticut River watershed as part of the Connect the Connecticut project (www.connecttheconnecticut.org) — a collaborative partnership under the auspices of the North Atlantic Landscape Conservation Cooperative (NALCC), and subsequently developed for the entire Northeast region as part of the Nature's Network project (www.naturesnetwork.org). HUC6 aquatic cores represent a combination of lotic core areas (river and stream) and lentic core areas (lake and pond) selected at the HUC6 scale (Fig. 1). In combination with the terrestrial cores, they spatially represent the ecological network designed to provide strategic guidance for conserving natural areas, and the fish, wildlife, and other components of biodiversity that they support within the Northeast.