The Wild Grid: From Margins to Networks

By Omar de Kok-Mercado, MS and Dan Kane, PhD with contributions from Clark Harshbarger and Wyatt Ball

This is part three of our four part Wilding series:

Part 1: From the Margins: Wilding the Edges of Agriculture

Part 2: The Wild Grid: Field Margins as a First Step

First photo by Omar de Kok-Mercado, 2025. All other photos are part of a March 2026 field visit taken by Philip Taylor.

In the field scale piece of this series, we argued that marginal acres are not ecological weaknesses but economic misalignments. At that scale, marginality reveals patterns. Drainageways trace through crops. Flood-prone depressions repeat. Thin ridgelines refuse to yield. When mapped, these acres begin to look less like noise and more like structure.

At the community scale, that structure becomes continuous. What appears fragmented within a single farm begins to resolve into corridors across a township. We start seeing patterns where marginal farmland acres connect to public lands, utility corridors, and more.

WHAT IS CONNECTIVITY?

Connectivity is more precise than it first appears. It does not require that habitat runs continuously from one patch to the next with no breaks in cover. A more useful definition is the degree to which a landscape mosaic facilitates the movement of species and their ability to access resources and habitat [1]. That distinction matters because it makes connectivity contextual: different species have different requirements, different tolerances for gaps, different relationships to the matrix they move through. A monarch butterfly and a wood thrush and a badger are navigating the same landscape very differently. Connectivity, understood this way, is not a single condition but a design problem. A design problem we can solve incrementally.

Fragmentation is now one of the defining conditions of agricultural landscapes. Even strong habitat patches can underperform when they are isolated, while more connected landscapes are better able to support movement, recolonization, gene flow, and resilience after disturbance, particularly under climate change [2]. Connectivity therefore is not a secondary feature of landscape design; it is one of the conditions that determines whether habitat can function over time and meet the needs of a diverse array of species. How do patches, corridors, edges, and movement pathways work together across the mosaic?

INTEGRATING CONNECTIVITY

Mapping connectivity and figuring out how to improve it in a given landscape, then, depends on which specific species or group you’re intending to impact, their needs, and the scale at which you’re working. But two concepts help us map connectivity at all scales and for all species—patch dynamics and landscape permeability/resistance [3, 4, 5].

Patch dynamics describe how islands of optimal habitat are distributed through a landscape and how metapopulations—small groups of an individual species that are part of a larger local population—move between them [5]. These islands are the areas animals call “home base” as they have the right combination of food and shelter to meet their needs—a population more or less can’t make it without a patch of this habitat type of sufficient size. Think about a duck. It needs a big enough pond or wetland. Bigger patches are often, though not always, better, because they are resilient to disturbance and can host larger populations. Understanding how these patches are distributed, how metapopulations use them, and how their structure influences their success is key to understanding an ecosystem and its species.

Landscape permeability or resistance describes how populations are able to move between patches [3]. Again, this concept is very species-specific. Most birds…can fly, and don’t necessarily need continuous cover to move between patches that might be separated by human infrastructure or habitat types that are not perfectly suited to their needs. Quail, by contrast, depend much more on protective cover and are far less likely to move across open, exposed ground. This matrix and the quality of it can have strong effects on the ability of habitat patches to support species [6].

These two concepts are critical to understanding and improving connectivity in agricultural landscapes. Small patches of remnant habitat in woodlots or unconverted acres dot the landscape, along with larger patches in preserved areas and parks. But the croplands that sit between these patches are not ideal habitat for many species and are generally not very permeable for animal movement.

This dynamic informs how we approach moving from the field scale, which we discussed in our last Substack post, to the community or landscape scale. Each of the fields in which we might work—mapping marginality, walking the land with farmers, and installing high-diversity prairie where they are best suited—exists within a larger landscape mosaic. Mapping the locations of existing habitat patches and the permeability of the landscape overall helps us to understand where to concentrate our efforts for maximum effect.

Connectivity is not the only logic for siting perennial systems. In agricultural landscapes, hydrologic function still matters deeply: water quality protection, flood attenuation, erosion control, and drainage management remain central. But these priorities often overlap on the same marginal acres. Connectivity adds another layer of intelligence, helping us identify where perennial systems can do multiple kinds of work at once and where isolated interventions might instead become part of a larger landscape strategy.

THE COORDINATION BARRIER

If connectivity were only a biophysical problem, we would have solved it by now.

We have mapped watersheds for decades. We know where floodplains expand, where erosion accelerates, where habitat fragments, and where row crops repeatedly fail. Conservation plans routinely identify priority acres and ideal corridors. Clearly, science is not the bottleneck.

The difficulty has always been coordination.

Marginal acres rarely align neatly within a single ownership boundary. Drainageways cross fence lines. Flood-prone soils extend into neighboring properties. A corridor that makes ecological sense often requires multiple landowners to move at once.

That kind of alignment is difficult to sustain, especially when neighbors may not share the same politics, the same timelines, the same labor resources, or the same financial pressures. Land changes hands. Tenants rotate. Commodity prices rise and fall. In the absence of a durable incentive, even well-designed conservation can unravel.

There is another reason ecological connectivity remains rare: it has rarely been the primary priority within conservation programs themselves. USDA and related programs can support practices on individual parcels, but they generally do not contain a meaningful connectivity element. They help fund pieces of the landscape, not the coordinated stewardship of connected corridors across multiple properties.

Modern conservation systems are far better at recognizing individuals than communities. They know how to enroll a parcel, contract with a landowner, issue a payment, and verify compliance. They are far less equipped to reward shared stewardship across a place. USDA programs can support practices on individual parcels, but they generally contain no meaningful connectivity element. They fund pieces of the landscape, not the coordinated stewardship of corridors across multiple properties. Participation remains voluntary. Maintenance remains discretionary. The work is framed as responsibility rather than opportunity.

This is not a failure of science or intention. It is a structural mismatch. Connectivity is not an individual outcome but a relational one, produced across neighbors, parcels, and time. And we have built almost no institutions designed to reward it.

Without an economic and governance structure that rewards coordination, connectivity remains thin. It depends on alignment of values, relationships, and personalities, which are rarely stable across time.

If the Wild Grid is to move beyond isolated projects, it must operate at the level where coordination becomes durable: the community. Community scale has to answer this question directly: why would multiple landowners commit to managing connected corridors together, year after year?

That is where economic coherence becomes essential, and a stewardship economy takes shape. The next question is what community scale actually makes possible that isolated projects do not.

CONNECTIVITY AS ECONOMIC STRUCTURE

Community scale does not simply mean a larger acreage total. Economically, it means a level of organization at which multiple landholders can participate in a shared landscape function. A corridor stops being an isolated conservation practice on an individual farm and starts becoming part of a connected system that can support management, movement, and economic activity across a place.

At the field scale, a perennial strip can stabilize soil and slow water; those benefits are real. But a narrow strip rarely supports a viable enterprise. It remains an ecological improvement layered onto an annual system.

At community scale, the economics begin to change.

When marginal acres connect across farms, they accumulate area. What was once scattered underperformance becomes a continuous band of perennial ground. It is continuity that allows movement.

Livestock require space, and fire requires room to operate. Managed disturbance requires coordination, labor, and enough continuous ground to justify the effort. These are difficult to organize when perennial plantings are small and isolated, but they become more feasible when corridors are wide enough and long enough to support movement, management, and shared use across properties.

Consider what a modest version of this looks like in practice. Three neighboring farms in a watershed share a drainageway that traces through each of their fields. Individually, none of them has enough marginal acreage to justify dedicated fencing, water infrastructure, or a grazing agreement with a custom operator. Together, they might have 200 connected acres of reconstructed prairie and riparian corridor, enough to run a small herd through a rotational circuit from May to October, generating lease revenue for each landowner while keeping the vegetation in an actively managed state. That is not a conservation project. That is a working system. And it only exists because the acres are connected.

Grazing may be the most immediate entry point, but not the only one. Livestock markets already exist, perennial biomass can be converted into food, and grazing can help keep vegetation in an actively managed state. Over time, corridors could also support additional revenue sources that are not via agricultural markets, such as hunting, recreational access, and ecosystem service payments. Connectivity acts as a scalar to the value of each of these. For example, biodiversity impacts are likely to be greater and more resilient than if the focus were on small patches of habitat, meaning the value of biodiversity credits is greater or nature-related risk exposures are more effectively reduced. Community-scale connectivity creates the conditions for perennial corridors to function as working land rather than leftover land.

Scale alone does not answer who manages the herd, who benefits, or how labor is coordinated. It does, however, create conditions in which those questions become worth solving, because the corridor is no longer a scattered set of small interventions but a continuous asset with enough scale to justify agreements, infrastructure, and recurring management. A single farm may not hold enough marginal acreage to justify dedicated infrastructure, management agreements, or contracted disturbance. Several neighboring farms, connected, might.

From there, the form can vary: a custom grazier, a shared burn plan, a corridor lease agreement, or a coordinated contract with an entity interested in paying for improvements to ecosystem services. Once a corridor carries recurring operational value, it stops functioning as an optional conservation add-on. It becomes an asset with real economic value and enters the operating calendar.

The comparison to infrastructure matters here, but not because connectivity emerges automatically wherever value appears. Roads, transmission lines, and pipelines remain connected across private land because value is paired with authority, access, and assigned responsibility. Their continuity is not maintained through diffuse public goodwill or voluntary neighbor-to-neighbor coordination. It is stabilized by governance: public budgets, easements, rights-of-way, regulatory processes, and institutions charged with upkeep. In other words, durable connectivity is not just an economic outcome. It is an institutional one.

For ecological corridors, the lesson is similar: shared use matters, but durable connectivity depends on structures of stewardship, access, and governance that can coordinate action across property lines through time.

FROM FIELDS TO NETWORKS

Once connectivity becomes durable at the community scale, its effects do not stop at the corridor edge.

A connected corridor does more than link marginal acres. It creates a new spatial logic for the surrounding farmed landscape. What was previously managed as a set of discrete fields can begin to be understood in relation to movement, access, adjacency, and operational sequencing across a larger geography.

This does not mean every farm changes in the same way, or that connectivity automatically reshapes cropping decisions. Farmers still make decisions based on commodity prices, labor, equipment, tenancy, weather, soil conditions, markets, and risk. Connectivity can change what becomes feasible within that larger set of constraints. Many other factors still matter. But it does mean new options begin to emerge. Fields adjacent to perennial corridors may become more compatible with cover crops, extended rotations, managed forage, diversified enterprises, or other practices that benefit from nearby perennial structure and coordinated use. Where ecologically appropriate, greater vertical complexity in the form of silvopasture or viable tree crops may also become more thinkable over time.

The important shift is not that every acre transforms at once. It is that the network becomes a planning layer that sits above individual fields. Farmers still manage their own acres, but they do so within a larger pattern that can influence timing, movement, enterprise, and land use over time.

Community scale is where isolated conservation efforts begin to take on the character of infrastructure, not because they are centralized, but because they become spatially legible, functionally connected, and capable of linking with adjacent systems. The land does not change all at once. But once connectivity reaches sufficient density, it begins to guide how the surrounding landscape evolves.

What begins as a few neighbors deciding to manage their margins together becomes the first legible unit of something much larger. A corridor across one farm is a practice. A corridor across many farms is a network. From here, the question becomes how networks persist, and who is responsible for keeping them alive.

RESOURCES

1. Taylor, P.D., Fahrig, L., Henein, K., Merriam, G., 1993. Connectivity Is a Vital Element of Landscape Structure. Oikos 68, 571–573. https://doi.org/10.2307/3544927

2. Parks, S.A., Holsinger, L.M., Abatzoglou, J.T., Littlefield, C.E., Zeller, K.A., 2023. Protected areas not likely to serve as steppingstones for species undergoing climate-induced range shifts. Global Change Biology 29, 2681–2696. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.16629

3. Dutta, T., Sharma, S., Meyer, N.F.V., Larroque, J., Balkenhol, N., 2022. An overview of computational tools for preparing, constructing and using resistance surfaces in connectivity research. Landsc Ecol 37, 2195–2224. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-022-01469-x

4. Field, R.D., Parrott, L., 2022. Mapping the functional connectivity of ecosystem services supply across a regional landscape. eLife 11, e69395. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.69395

5. Leibold, M.A., Holyoak, M., Mouquet, N., Amarasekare, P., Chase, J.M., Hoopes, M.F., Holt, R.D., Shurin, J.B., Law, R., Tilman, D., Loreau, M., Gonzalez, A., 2004. The metacommunity concept: a framework for multi‐scale community ecology. Ecology Letters 7, 601–613. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1461-0248.2004.00608.x

6. Ricketts, T.H., 2001. The matrix matters: effective isolation in fragmented landscapes. Am Nat 158, 87–99. https://doi.org/10.1086/320863