Abstract
Sustainable land-use planning should consider large-scale landscape connectivity. Commonly-used species-specific connectivity models are difficult to generalize for a wide range of taxa. In the context of multi-functional land-use planning, there is growing interest in species-agnostic approaches, modelling connectivity as a function of human landscape modification. We propose a conceptual framework, apply it to model connectivity as current density across Alberta, Canada, and assess map sensitivity to modelling decisions. We directly compared the uncertainty related to (1) the definition of the degree of human modification, (2) the decision whether water bodies are considered barriers to movement, and (3) the scaling function used to translate degree of human modification into resistance values. Connectivity maps were most sensitive to the consideration of water as barrier to movement, followed by the choice of scaling function, whereas maps were more robust to different conceptualizations of the degree of human modification. We observed higher concordance among cells with high (standardized) current density values than among cells with low values, which supports the identification of cells contributing to larger-scale connectivity based on a cut-off value. We conclude that every parameter in species-agnostic connectivity modelling requires attention, not only the definition of often-criticized expert-based degrees of human modification.
Highlights
Land-use and land-cover changes have impacted many natural ecosystems to provide ecosystem goods and services for an ever-growing human population[1]
We (i) propose a conceptual framework for species-agnostic connectivity modelling based on current density; (ii) discuss conceptual and computational decisions involved in implementing the approach; and (iii) assess the degree of uncertainty related to these decisions
We suggest that species-level data, such as mark-recapture, radio-telemetry, and molecular genetics data, which provide a direct measure of actual functional connectivity, may be used to test and compare species-agnostic or multi-species connectivity models
Summary
Land-use and land-cover changes have impacted many natural ecosystems to provide ecosystem goods and services for an ever-growing human population[1]. As landscape connectivity facilitates organism dispersal, gene flow, and many other ecological functions of a landscape[14], its erosion is a major concern for wildlife population survival, due to increase of extinction risk, loss of species diversity, and disruption of major ecosystem services[11,15,16,17] For these reasons, connectivity is considered a key aspect of land-use planning and conservation management[18,19]. Large-scale analyses may require large numbers of focal species to represent diverse habitat types[20] To overcome these limitations, there is growing interest in applying a top-down approach, which does not rely on biological or ecological characteristics for specific taxa to model large-scale connectivity maps for management and planning efforts[30,31], recently known as a “species-agnostic” approach (e.g.32). This makes it possible to investigate multiple corridor routing options[44]
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