Connectivity flagships and umbrellas: Evaluating surrogate species for the conservation of landscape connectivity

Background/Question/Methods

An increasingly common strategy for protecting threatened species in fragmented landscapes is to conserve or restore habitat with the goal of increasing landscape connectivity between patches of breeding habitat. To identify key connections between habitats, planners often focus on areas important to the dispersal of large vertebrates. Focusing on these so-called “umbrella”, “flagship”, or “keystone” species, planners make the often untested assumption that improving connectivity for the surrogate species will also improve connectivity for a larger suite of species of conservation concern.  We develop a framework to test the effectiveness of surrogate species for the conservation of landscape connectivity, and then apply this framework to a suite of threatened species in a fragmented, longleaf-pine dominated landscape in the vicinity of Ft. Bragg, NC.  We first developed dispersal models for each species, and then evaluated whether the conservation of important dispersal habitats for one species would also conserve areas important to the dispersal of the others.

Results/Conclusions

We found that high-value dispersal habitat for all of our focal species overlapped significantly more than would be expected by chance alone. Much of this congruence, however, was due to the fact that nearly all the high-value dispersal habitat was located on lands currently managed for conservation. When only currently managed lands were considered, high-value dispersal habitats for each pair of species were spatially independent from one another. We also found that the federally endangered Red-cockaded Woodpecker (Picoides borealis), a flagship species for conservation in longleaf-pine dominated ecosystems, was not the best-performing surrogate species for conserving landscape connectivity.  Overall, we conclude that there are no irreconcilable conflicts between the dispersal habitat needs of these particular species, and behaviorally-informed conservation, if done carefully, can preserve connectivity simultaneously for multiple threatened species with divergent habitat requirements and dispersal behaviors.