Forest landscape connectivity to prioritize afforestation in urban ecosystems: Seoul as a case study

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Forest landscape connectivity is a key indicator that reflects the quality and function of the ecological environment. In urban ecosystems, analysis frameworks are needed to prioritize and optimize afforestation projects that maintain and increase forest landscape connectivity to help mitigate the increasing fragmentation of urban habitats, coordinate the relationship between urban development and urban ecosystem services, and guide decision making processes. The objective of this study is to identify forest patches that are most worth conserving and small patches that make the most significant contribution to landscape connectivity after their transformation into forest patches in a high-density city. We conducted a case study in Seoul, South Korea, where we initially quantified the landscape connectivity changes from 2001 to 2018 using the probability of connectivity (PC) and integral index of connectivity indices. Subsequently, we calculated the importance of each forest patch for four different years and ranked the potential contribution of each patch based on data from 2018 using the delta values for PC index (dPC). Our results showed that forest landscape connectivity in Seoul increased significantly from 2001 to 2018. In all four years, the ten forest patches with the highest dPC values remained nearly unchanged and were large in size; however, the individual area of each patch was not strictly related to its importance for connectivity. Based on these findings, we further examined the potential effect that the afforestation of habitat patches smaller than 20 ha would have on the overall forest landscape connectivity in Seoul. We also identified the 50 most important patches for afforestation using six land use and land cover types to provide a guide for effective afforestation efforts in Seoul. We expect that this study could enhance the effectiveness of habitat connectivity intervention while providing a realistic strategy for ecological afforestation planning in urban ecosystems.