Case study: Habitat connectivity for sage grouse

 

The Greater Sage Grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) is a species of conservation concern in the sagebrush biome of the western United States. We used a habitat model for sage grouse as input to 2 related functions: subset current flow centrality, as calculated by the program Circuitscape (top panel), and all-pairs current flow centrality calculated by the CAT (bottom panel). Subset nodes in Circuitscape (shown in black) were based on the geographic centroids of sage grouse subpopulations. Linkages of greater importance (more current) are shown in darker orange shades. The results shown in the two panels are similar, and as the number of subset nodes is further increased, Circuitscape results will more closely approximate the results of all-pairs current flow centrality.