Predicting areas important for ecological connectivity throughout Canada.

ABSTRACT: Governments around the world have acknowledged that urgent action is needed to conserve and restore ecological connectivity to help reverse the decline of biodiversity. In this study we tested the hypothesis that functional connectivity for multiple species can be estimated across Canada using a single, upstream connectivity model. We developed a movement cost layer with cost values assigned using expert opinion to anthropogenic land cover features and natural features based on their known and assumed effects on the movement of terrestrial, non-volant fauna. We used Circuitscape to conduct an omnidirectional connectivity analysis for terrestrial landscapes, in which the potential contribution of all landscape elements to connectivity were considered and where source and destination nodes w

SUBMITTER: Pither R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9946242 | biostudies-literature | 2023

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature