Landscape Connectivity as a Function of Scale and Organism Vagility in a Real Forested Landscape

By R. D’eon, S. M. Glenn, Ian Parfitt, Marie-Josée Fortin. 2002

139 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Landscape connectivity is considered a vital element of landscape structure because of its importance to population survival. The difficulty surrounding the notion of landscape connectivity is that it must be assessed at the scale of the interaction between an organism and the landscape. We present a unique method for measuring connectivity between patches as a function of organism vagility. We used this approach to assess connectivity between harvest, old-growth, and recent wildfire patches in a real forested landscape in southeast British Columbia. By varying a distance criterion, habitat patches were considered connected and formed habitat clusters if they fell within this critical distance. The amount of area and distance to edge within clusters at each critical distance formed the basis of connectivity between patches. We then assessed landscape connectivity relative to old-growth associates within our study area based on species' dispersal abilities. Connectivity was greatest between harvest patches, followed by old-growth, and then wildfire patches. In old-growth patches, we found significant trends between increased connectivity and increased total habitat amount, and between decreased connectivity and increased old-growth harvesting. Highly vagile old-growth associates, such as carnivorous birds, perceive this landscape as connected and are able to access all patches. Smaller, less vagile species, such as woodpeckers, chickadees, and nuthatches, may be affected by a lack of landscape connectivity at the scale of their interaction with old-growth patches. Of particular concern is the northern flying squirrel (Glaucomys sabrinus), which we predict is limited in this landscape due to relatively weak dispersal abilities.

Subfields: Ecology, Insect Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/79889a272876a394938b34dea59bfca61350d42e

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Citations in the corpus

Linking plant phenology to conservation biology (2016, background): “Fragmented and spatially isolated habitat patches can remain connected and ecologically functional if their populations maintain ecological interactions and gene flow among individuals across the landscape (D'Eon et al., 2002; Fahrig et al., 2011).”
Ecological correlates of dispersal distance in terrestrial mammals (2013, background): “…met- rics and adopted to set a fixed critical distance after which a species probability of dispersal is assumed to decline rapidly (Keitt et al., 1997; Bunn et al., 2000; van Langevelde, 2000; Urban andKeitt, 2001; D’Eon et al., 2002; Fagan and Calabrese, 2006; van Teeffelen et al., 2006).”
Species, Data, and Conservation Planning (2004, background): “…revealed by data on species distribution and movements (e.g., Powell & Bjork 1995); connectivity is dependent on the dispersal ability of species (e.g., D’Eon et al. 2002); and habitat suitability and effective population sizes are clearly relative to particular species (e.g., Allen et al. 2001).”
A comparison-shopper's guide to connectivity metrics (2004, methodology): “After establishing pairwise connections, graph-theoretic approaches scale up to consider the connectivity of the entire patch network (landscape level), using metrics including correlation length, distance to cluster edge, number of graph components, and diameter of the largest graph component (Keit”
Graph models of habitat mosaics. (2009, background): “One particularly informative representation of a landscape graph is a series of figures that show how connectivity varies with different assumptions about dispersal capacity for the target species (Bunn et al. 2000; D Eon et al. 2002).”
Genetic isolation by distance and landscape connectivity in the American marten (Martes americana) (2006, unknown): “This measure characterizes pairs of individuals (or locations), therefore differing from patch-based (Hanski 1999; D’Eon et al. 2002) and landscape-based measures of connectivity (Tischendorf and Fahrig 2000).”
Habitat models and habitat connectivity analysis for butterflies and burnet moths - The example of Zygaena carniolica and Coenonympha arcania (2005, result): “Our results showed that (1) the presence of the burnet depended mainly on the presence of nectar plants and of nutrient-poor dry grasslands in direct vicinity, that of the nymphalid on larger areas of extensively used dry grasslands within 100 m vicinity in combination with small patches of higher…”