Speaker
Description
Continual fragmentation of terrestrial and freshwater habitats can produce multiple negative impacts to wildlife populations, plant community persistence and overall ecosystem functioning. Preserving connectivity between crucial habitat areas and across large landscapes is vital to sustain biodiversity during ongoing anthropogenic global change. Identifying key ecological corridors at spatial extents large enough to capture current and future ecological dynamics and at resolutions fine enough to be useful for practitioners is a vital step in prioritizing areas for connectivity conservation. We used omnidirectional circuit theory methods to model the Pan-European connectivity of ten different large mammal species. From these results we identified key ecological corridors and then used a combination of graph theoretic models and ecological indicators to prioritise corridors for conservation across the continent. We found that models of large herbivores showed more diffuse movement of wildlife across the landscape, indicating the difficulty in identifying key movement corridors for these species. In contrast, meso-predator and apex predator models identified narrower critical corridors for conservation. Despite these relative differences our results found several consistent spatial overlaps in local corridors prioritized for the predator and herbivore species. These results point to the need to prioritize the conservation of multiple key corridors that still exist, most prominently in Italy, Spain, Slovakia, Romania and the Balkans. In addition, our results highlight the need for restoration of fractured connections between protected areas across much of heavily fragmented Western Europe, especially in France and Germany.
| Status Group | Postdoctoral Researcher |
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