Print PageEcologists, land managers and conservation planners face numerous technical and logistical challenges in assisting the recovery of imperiled wildlife species. One of these challenges is managing for the connectivity of wildlife habitat, especially when logistical resources and biological data are limited. Here we describe the development and operation of a GIS toolbox for ArcGIS 9.3, called “Connect”, designed to help conservation practitioners easily incorporate habitat connectivity considerations into land management and land-use planning. “Connect” provides three GIS tools that build off of existing free and open-source software. The first tool creates simple animal dispersal models using circuit theory. The second tool uses the zonation algorithm to combine dispersal models from multiple species to prioritize habitat patches for conservation or restoration of landscape connectivity. Optionally, this tool can also incorporate social data into the habitat prioritization, including land acquisition costs and development threats. The third tool uses network analysis algorithms from graph theory to measure the impact of alternative land-use scenarios on landscape connectivity.
Results/Conclusions
The “Connect” tools were developed in partnership with conservation stakeholders in the vicinity of Fort Bragg, North Carolina. We present two stakeholder-driven case studies that demonstrate the usefulness of our work. First, we use the Connect tools to prioritize private land parcels for connectivity conservation in fragmented habitats around Fort Bragg, NC, for a suite of species that are currently of conservation concern, including the eastern tiger salamander, ornate chorus frog, and the St. Francis saytr, a federally endangered butterfly. Second, we identify important dispersal corridors for the federally endangered red-cockaded woodpecker that are threatened by suburban development near the city of Fayetteville. Our results show that legal protection of lands currently targeted for conservation of red-cockaded woodpeckers would not protect important dispersal corridors for the other species in the study. Further, our analysis identifies "robust corridors" for RCW dispersal that are not likeley to be interupted by near-future land-use change. Based on our analysis and feedback from our project partners, we conclude that the Connect tools provide a useful platform for planning the adaptive management of multi-species habitat connectivity in complex landscapes.
