Impacts of roads on woodland landscape connectivity: a case study of Gongyi City, Henan Province

Abstract

Landscape connectivity, defined as the degree to which the landscape facilitates or impedes the movement of organisms or ecological processes among patches, has been widely recognized as one of the key objectives in studies of forest landscape management, ecological conservation and construction. The dispersal ability of organisms across changing landscapes is critical for long鄄term biodiversity conservation, and successful dispersal of organisms always depends on the landscape connectivity. The landscape fragmentation caused by roads has significant effects on the landscape pattern and ecological processes, such as the migration of species and biodiversity maintenance in different ecosystems of landscape. This paper aims to analyse the road impact on forest landscape connectivity in mountain area of Gongyi City, Henan Province, China. The landscape connectivity is evaluated based on a graph鄄theory framework, in which a graph represents a landscape as a set of nodes (habitat patches) connected to some degree by edges that join pairs of nodes functionally. Both the graph structure and the habitat availability metrics provide significant improvements for analyzing landscape connectivity and decision making in conservation planning of different ecosystems or landscapes. The geographic data sets for the study area, such as DEM, landuse, soil, vegetation and hydrology, were collected and managed in GIS. Two connectivity indicators, the probability index of connectivity (PC) and the importance value (Percentage of the variation in PC, dPC k) , were calculated. Considering the dispersal distances for different organisms, we examined the variation of landscape connectivity of the woodland in the low and middle mountainous areas according to five distance thresholds: 0.5 km, 1 km,

Analysis of Forest Landscape Restoration Based on Landscape Connectivity: A Case Study in the Yi River Basin, China, during 2015–2020

“…However, with the process of large-scale urbanization and the loss of natural habitats in China, landscape connectivity has received increased attention in recent years. Research on landscape connectivity has been widely applied in fields such as Land 2021, 10, 904 2 of 11 the construction of landscape security patterns [6] and urban ecological networks [7,8], assessments of urban land suitability [9,10] and suitable habitats for wildlife [11], land use changes and its effects on landscape connectivity [12][13][14], etc. Previous studies have shown that landscape connectivity has significant impacts on forest ecosystem functions, such as seed migration and dispersal, animal migration, gene flow, infiltration interference and soil erosion, and further influences the completeness, sustainability and stability of forest ecosystems [14][15][16][17].…”