ale mountain lions need room to roam - a whopping 200 square miles, minimum. Females need about 50, meaning there can be as many as four females per each male's territory. Bobcats, coyotes, mule deer and other wildlife similarly require acre after acre of interconnected land to forage, hunt and mate.

Nature, in other words, needs space on a grand scale. The Irvine Ranch Land Reserve plays an important role in meeting that need. In planning the reserve, The Irvine Company took care to preserve large areas of land - not fragmented islands - knowing that plant and animal species would have a better chance to not only survive, but thrive.

While vast in and of itself, the Irvine Ranch Land Reserve provides linkages to other large preserved open spaces throughout Southern California. This interconnectivity allows entire habitats to flourish uninterrupted, in turn increasing the amount of habitat available to animals. It also helps prevent in-breeding by providing animals a larger gene pool for mating, according to The Nature Conservancy.

Some of these linkages are direct, border-to-border connections: Limestone and Fremont canyons near east Orange, for example, transition to the Santa Ana Mountains and the Cleveland National Forest. The result is an enormous interconnected series of open spaces that also includes Ronald W. Caspers Wilderness Park in south Orange County, Camp Pendleton between Orange and San Diego counties, and the Santa Rosa Plateau Ecological Reserve in Riverside County.

Other linkages are in the form of wildlife corridors, usually narrower areas of land - a creek bed, a pathway under a toll road, even a golf course - that enable animals to move freely from one large open space area to the next. For example, animals can journey between Fremont and Limestone canyons via the Santiago Creek Wildlife Corridor.

"In Southern California, providing linkages between large, preserved open spaces becomes even more important as urban growth continues," says Trish Smith, senior project ecologist with The Nature Conservancy of California. "And that's just one more reason why the Irvine Ranch Land Reserve is so unique and important."