We (me and Bruno Silva) have written a short communication which was just accepted for publication on Ecological Modelling. This contribution presents our package “lconnect R Package: A Versatile Tool for Evaluating Landscape Connectivity and Prioritizing Habitat Patches in Conservation Research“.
Here’s the abstract:
Biodiversity conservation faces significant challenges due to human-induced climate and habitat change. Understanding these threats’ effects and interactions is crucial for effective conservation planning. Here, we present the lconnect R package, a user-friendly tool for assessing landscape connectivity and prioritizing habitat patches. The package allows researchers to analyze and quantify structural connectivity metrics and prioritize patches based on their contribution to overall landscape connectivity. By facilitating the evaluation of landscape connectivity and patch prioritization, lconnect supports informed decision-making in landscape ecology and conservation biology. The package’s advantages, relative to other available tools, are discussed, and an example of its application is presented. Overall, the lconnect R package presents a valuable addition to the toolbox of landscape ecologists, empowering them to better understand and address the challenges of habitat fragmentation and loss in biodiversity conservation.
I will share the link to the paper as soon as it is available!
* This post has been written by Vinicius Bastazini, Larissa Oliveira Gonçalves,Andreas Kindel andFernanda Zimmermann Teixeira
A once borderless world occupied by vast extensions of natural habitats of all sorts and shapes has become shredded into pieces with the increase of human activities in the past centuries, especially after the Industrial Revolution (United Nations Environment Programme 2019). Habitat fragmentation, a process in which contiguous habitats are divided into smaller and somewhat isolated patches, has become a ubiquitous result of human activities, threatening species both on land and in the oceans. Dampening the effects of habitat fragmentation on biodiversity has become a conservation priority across the globe, with much effort put forward in order to maintain or restore the connectivity of habitat patches scattered on human-dominated landscapes.
Ecological connectivity can be broadly defined as the degree of connection among patches of habitats distributed in a landscape, facilitating the movement of species and the provision of ecological functions and services on which we depend upon (we have published a series of posts in our blog with analytical tools and issues related to ecological connectivity, see them here and here). Changes in ecological connectivity have profound effects on population abundance and persistence. These effects can scale up across levels of biological organization, altering patterns of species composition, richness and interspecific interactions, ultimately affecting ecosystem functioning. Thus, due to its paramount importance in safeguarding biodiversity in the present and in the near future, ecological connectivity is considered an essential component of climate change adaptation (Torres et al. 2022).
Despite its importance, changes in ecological connectivity are usually ignored in Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs). EIAs are one of the most important instruments used worldwide to avoid or reduce the impacts of anthropogenic developments on biodiversity at the national or regional levels. They include the process of identifying, predicting, evaluating and mitigating impacts prior to the implementation of development proposals and, as such, they are the best opportunity to avoid the loss of ecological connectivity.
In a recent paper led by Larissa O. Gonçalves, we show ways of overcoming the existing gaps and obstacles in the assessment of ecological connectivity loss in EIAs of transport infrastructure projects, namely roads and railways. We also identify directions for future research programs that can contribute to integrating ecological connectivity into EIA practice and suggest how to improve mitigation design and implementation. Our paper is part of a special issue featuring seven articles, which resulted from a session titled ‘Prioritizing landscape connectivity in environmental impact assessment’ that took place in the 2021 International Conference of the International Association for Impact Assessment.
We also suggest 14 basic steps, summarized in Figure 1, that would improve connectivity assessments in EIAs and contribute to better mitigation planning for the negative effects of human developments on biodiversity and ecological functions (for a detailed description of these steps, please refer to the original paper, or see a summary here).
Figure 1: Steps to improve connectivity analyses and assessment in Environmental Impact Assessment for road projects. Although each step can be applied independently from one another, they should be progressively included into the EIA practice.
A paper has just been published, resorting to MetaLandSim to simulate metapopulations, in Landscape Ecology. The title is “Quantifying cross-scale patch contributions to spatial connectivity”, by Cumming et al.
Context Connectivity between habitat patches is vital for ecological processes at multiple scales. Traditional metrics do not measure the scales at which individual habitat patches contribute to the overall ecological connectivity of the landscape. Connectivity has previously been evaluated at several different scales based on the dispersal capabilities of particular organisms, but these approaches are data-heavy and conditioned on just a few species.
Objectives Our objective was to improve cross-scale measurement of connectivity by developing and testing a new landscape metric, cross-scale centrality.
Methods Cross-scale centrality (CSC) integrates over measurements of patch centrality at different scales (hypothetical dispersal distances) to quantify the cross-scale contribution of each individual habitat patch to overall landscape or seascape connectivity. We tested CSC against an independent metapopulation simulation model and demonstrated its potential application in conservation planning by comparison to an alternative approach that used individual dispersal data.
Results CSC correlated significantly with total patch occupancy across the entire landscape in our metapopulation simulation, while being much faster and easier to calculate. Standard conservation planning software (Marxan) using dispersal data was weaker than CSC at capturing locations with high cross-scale connectivity.
Conclusions Metrics that measure pattern across multiple scales are much faster and more efficient than full simulation models and more rigorous and interpretable than ad hoc incorporation of connectivity into conservation plans. In reality, connectivity matters for many different organisms across many different scales. Metrics like CSC that quantify landscape pattern across multiple different scales can make a valuable contribution to multi-scale landscape measurement, planning, and management.
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