The Conservation Science Blog

The Connectivity Analysis Toolkit is a software interface that provides conservation planners with newly-developed tools for both linkage mapping and landscape-level ‘centrality’ analysis. Centrality refers to a group of landscape metrics that rank the importance of sites as gatekeepers for flow across a landscape network. The Toolkit allows users to develop and compare three contrasting centrality metrics based on input data representing habitat suitability or permeability, in order to determine which areas, across the landscape as a whole, would be priorities for conservation measures that might facilitate connectivity and dispersal. The Toolkit also allows application of these approaches to the more common question of mapping the best habitat linkages between a source and a target patch. The software is freely available at www.connectivitytools.org (a link is also posted on this blog site). A detailed manual included in the download gives more background on the methods, and may also be useful to those who are not GIS modelers but are interested in conservation planning. Although this blog has a purposely limited audience, we plan to make the software broadly available, so please feel free to distribute this information and the location of the download website to anyone who may be interested.

Conservation planners increasingly seek to consider both biodiversity process and pattern in reserve design. However, in part due to computational limitations, most current reserve design tools remained focused on either 1) the selection of sites that capture elements of biodiversity pattern but ignore connectivity, or 2) connectivity mapping methods that have key limitations, such as the need to identify in advance the source and target of linkages. We have developed a software ‘toolkit’ that combines several new connectivity analysis and mapping methods. These methods provide a means to quantitatively incorporate connectivity within the planning process, while overcoming some of the limitations of previous linkage mapping methods. We hope to release the software for beta testing in August-September 2010. If you would like to be informed of the availability of the beta release, please go to the
Beta release registration page

In a talk on 25 February at the American Geophysical Union’s 2010 Ocean Sciences meeting in Portland, Oregon, researcher Andrew Pershing proposed that carbon credits be granted for whale conservation. Continue reading →