Preserving connectivity under climate and land-use change: No one-size-fits-all approach for focal species in similar habitats

Costanza, Jennifer K.; Watling, James I.; Sutherland, Ron; Belyea, Curtis; Dilkina, Bistra; Cayton, Heather; Bucklin, David N.; Romañach, Stephanie S.; Haddad, Nick M.

doi:10.1016/j.biocon.2020.108678

Cited by 19 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 50 publications

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“…Some efforts use a generalist or wide-ranging species, like deer, to represent connectivity broadly for all wildlife. Movement of generalist species, however, may not adequately capture movement and habitat needs for more specialist species (Krosby et al, 2015;Meurant et al, 2018;Costanza et al, 2020). Based on differences within taxonomic groups identified in the literature (e.g., Loss et al, 2014;Fensome and Mathews, 2016;Jacobson et al, 2016;Hill et al, 2021) as well as differences among taxonomic groups, as illustrated here and elsewhere (e.g., Tessier et al, 2020), it is clearly important to consider connectivity for multiple different types of taxa when considering both road impacts and siting for mitigation.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Visualizing Connectivity for Wildlife in a World Without Roads

Rivera

Bliss-Ketchum²,

Lafrenz

et al. 2022

Front. Environ. Sci.

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Roads are not the only determining factor for wildlife movement across the landscape, but due to the extensive distribution of the road network their impact can be dramatic. Although it has been well documented that roads decrease habitat connectivity for wildlife due to animal-vehicle collisions, habitat fragmentation, and avoidance behavior, approaches for identifying connectivity across the landscape often do not fully examine the barrier effect of roads. Here, we explored the extent of the impact of roadways on wildlife connectivity by using Omniscape to model connectivity including and without the barrier effect of roads, then evaluating the difference between these two models. We created these connectivity models for three organisms that represent different taxa, movement types, and habitat requirements: northern red-legged frog, Pacific-slope flycatcher, and Columbian black-tailed deer. We found that roads had a strong impact on connectivity for all three species. Change in flow was most pronounced on the roads, especially where they ran through permeable habitat for a species. Roads also influenced connectivity well beyond the footprint of the roadway, affecting flows intersecting the roads and diffusely around them. The extent and nature of this impact depended on the species, road density, and surrounding habitat. The different effects across species highlight the importance of considering different taxa simultaneously while planning. Moreover, the ability to assess modeled wildlife habitat connectivity in the absence of existing widespread linear infrastructure allows for critical evaluation of where mitigation activities, such as wildlife crossing structures and fencing, may be most beneficial. Hence, this novel approach has practical application for increasing connectivity for wildlife across roads.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Visualizing Connectivity for Wildlife in a World Without Roads

Rivera

Bliss-Ketchum²,

Lafrenz

et al. 2022

Front. Environ. Sci.

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“…Urbanization, as the core driving force that promotes land-use change, has brought many benefits to regional development, such as economic growth, infrastructure improvement, and more employment opportunities [ 34 , 35 ], but it has also produced a series of problems, such as the disorderly expansion of construction land, deforestation, and farmland loss [ 36 ]. Existing research conclusions show that changes in land-use patterns have led to biodiversity loss, ecosystem disintegration, and a reduction in the connectivity of biological populations [ 37 , 38 ].…”

Section: Literature Review and Research Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multi-Scenario Simulation of Land Use and Habitat Quality in the Guanzhong Plain Urban Agglomeration, China

Song

Xue

2022

IJERPH

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Regional habitat quality is a proxy of biodiversity. Simulating changes in land use and habitat quality in urban agglomerations is the scientific basis for promoting the optimal allocation of land resources and building ecological civilizations in urban agglomerations. Therefore, we established a research framework mainly consisting of the Future Land Use Simulation (FLUS) model with the Integrated Valuation of Environmental Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST) model to predict the spatial and temporal distribution of habitat quality. In addition, we set three scenarios which were a natural development scenario, a cultivated land protection scenario, and an ecological protection scenario to analyze the changes of habitat quality in the Guanzhong Plain urban agglomeration in 2035. The results showed that: (1) the FLUS model had an excellent effect on the simulation of land-use change in the Guanzhong Plain urban agglomeration, with an overall accuracy of 0.952 and a kappa coefficient of 0.924. (2) From 2000 to 2035, the cultivated land area of the study area, which was mainly transferred into construction land and grassland, shrank due to the process of urbanization. (3) The habitat quality score of this region gradually decreased from 2000 to 2020, and it continued to decrease to 0.6921 in 2035 under the natural development scenario, while it increased under the other two scenarios. The low-value areas of habitat quality were mainly located in the middle of this region with Xi’an as the core, whereas the high-value areas were mainly distributed in the southern Qinling Mountains and the northern Loess Plateau. (4) Of the different scenarios, the ecological protection scenario had the highest habitat quality, while the natural development scenario had the lowest. Besides this, we also found that the cultivated protection scenario had high habitat quality, which was mainly because the rate of occupation of ecological land was controlled. The results are expected to provide a scientific basis for optimizing the spatial allocation of land resources and promoting the sustainable use of land space in other ecologically fragile urban agglomerations.

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“…ENMs can be converted to SDMs through post‐modelling analysis; for instance, predictions from a climate‐based ENM can be cut based on variables (e.g. urbanized areas) not included during model fitting (Costanza et al., 2020; Pearson & Dawson, 2003). As a potential flaw, this approach may lead to information loss by a priori removing from the model output some landscape patches which instead may be suitable for a part of the species’ life cycle (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A step towards SDMs: A “couple‐and‐weigh” framework based on accessible data for biodiversity conservation and landscape planning

Iannella

Console

Cerasoli

et al. 2021

Diversity and Distributions

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Aim The ongoing global change makes landscape planning and management of ecological corridors crucial to preserve biodiversity. We propose a workflow optimizing the use of different data sources to convert ecological niche models (ENMs) into landscape‐focused species distribution models (SDMs), using these latter to compute ecological corridors. We infer corridors connecting present occurrence localities to future climatic refugia as well as to localities where extinct populations occurred. Also, a continuous connectivity change index is proposed to assess current–future differences. Finally, we discuss possible applications of our workflow to conservation, assessing the capability of established protected areas to preserve ecological corridors. Location Europe. Methods As case study to illustrate our framework, we use a database comprising occurrence localities of Vipera ursinii, one of the most endangered European reptiles. We obtain weighted SDMs for each of the four V. ursinii subspecies by coupling climate‐based ENMs with standardized occurrence frequencies along land use and altitude gradients through weighted averaging in GIS. We calculate current and future landscape connectivity for each subspecies based on the corresponding weighted SDM. We compare predictive performance of “traditional” ENMs, including climate, land use and topography as predictors and weighted SDMs. Results Weighted SDMs outperform ENMs, according to Boyce index. SDMs are used to infer connectivity, predicted to decrease in all future scenarios for V. ursinii, and assess where connections may favour movements of individuals to, for example, future suitable areas. Generally, protected areas are predicted to cover low‐connectivity territories. Main conclusions The proposed “couple‐and‐weigh” approach could represent a helpful tool to investigate biogeography, conservation and landscape planning topics, as it permits to capitalize on occurrence records and accessible environmental predictors by narrowing the target species’ potential distribution, estimated within “traditional” ENMs, to the realized one through post‐modelling GIS analyses, which in turn improves estimation of friction maps used to infer connectivity.

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Preserving connectivity under climate and land-use change: No one-size-fits-all approach for focal species in similar habitats

Cited by 19 publications

References 50 publications

Visualizing Connectivity for Wildlife in a World Without Roads

Visualizing Connectivity for Wildlife in a World Without Roads

Multi-Scenario Simulation of Land Use and Habitat Quality in the Guanzhong Plain Urban Agglomeration, China

A step towards SDMs: A “couple‐and‐weigh” framework based on accessible data for biodiversity conservation and landscape planning

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