On the usage and measurement of landscape connectivity
Why is this work in the frame?
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame — the usual design — would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.
Abstract
This paper examines the usage and measurement of “landscape connectivity” in 33 recent studies. Connectivity is defined as the degree to which a landscape facilitates or impedes movement of organisms among resource patches. However, connectivity is actually used in a variety of ways in the literature. This has led to confusion and lack of clarity related to (1) function vs structure, (2) patch isolation vs landscape connectivity and, (3) corridors vs connectivity. We suggest the term connectivity should be reserved for its original purpose. We highlight nine studies; these include modeling studies that actually measured connectivity in accordance with the definition, and empirical studies that measured key components of connectivity. We found that measurements of connectivity provide results that can be interpreted as recommending habitat fragmentation to enhance landscape connectivity. We discuss reasons for this misleading conclusion, and suggest a new way of quantifying connectivity, which avoids this problem. We also recommend a method for reducing sampling intensity in landscape‐scale empirical studies of connectivity.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
The record
- Venue
- Oikos
- Topic
- Wildlife-Road Interactions and Conservation
- Field
- Environmental Science
- Canadian institutions
- —
- Funders
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaDeutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
- Keywords
- Landscape connectivityCLARITYFragmentation (computing)Computer scienceConfusionLandscape ecologyHabitat fragmentationFunctional connectivityVariety (cybernetics)EcologyResource (disambiguation)GeographyHabitatData scienceArtificial intelligenceBiologyBiological dispersalPopulationNeuroscience
- Has abstract in OpenAlex
- yes