Estimating effective landscape distances and movement corridors: Comparison of habitat and genetic data

By M. C. Mateo-Sánchez, Niko Balkenhol, Samuel A. Cushman, T. Pérez, A. Domínguez, Santiago Saura. 2015

164 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Resistance models provide a key foundation for landscape connectivity analyses and are widely used to delineate wildlife corridors. Currently, there is no general consensus regarding the most effective empirical methods to parameterize resistance models, but habitat data (species' presence data and related habitat suitability models) and genetic data are the most widely used and advocated approaches. However, the practical consequences of applying one or the other approach have not been well studied. To address this knowledge gap, we performed a comparative study on the implications of using habitat suitability versus genetic data for determining effective landscape distances (a proxy inversely related to isolation among patches) based on least-cost and circuit-theoretic approaches, and for identifying potential movement corridors. For our comparison, we used data for the Cantabrian brown bear in Spain, an endangered population for which connectivity has been identified as a major conservation concern. Ou...

Subfields: Ecology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/07d5dc6820a02d2febf83664a051301b31b2b95b

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In Ecology

Citations in the corpus

Circuit‐theory applications to connectivity science and conservation (2018, methodology): “…along with comparative method studies, has increased understanding of the strengths of circuit theory in conservation and highlights its complementarity with other methods for predicting movement, including least-cost paths (e.g., Howey 2011; Mateo-Sanchez et al. 2015; Marrotte & Bowman 2017).”
Amphibian decline, pond loss and reduced population connectivity under agricultural intensification over a 38 year period (2017, unknown): “To analyse landscape-derived resistance to amphibian dispersal we worked under the assumption that good habitat to live in is good habitat to disperse through (Mateo-Sánchez et al. 2015; see Zeller et al. 2012 for a general discussion).”