Landscape Assessment - Overview

ENV 761 - Landscape GIS   |   Spring 2024   |   Instructors: Peter Cada & John Fay  |  

Landscape Prioritization

Species distribution models like the one we created in the previous section are often key ingredients in landscape planning as they allow us to include a species range in the prioritization of areas for conservation. It’s rare, however, that we are able to protect the entire range of a given species, so we need to ask ourselves whether some areas of a species’ range might be more worth conserving than others. The answer, of course, is yes, and we’ll spend the next few weeks looking at different ways to examine and prioritize areas within a species range for conservation.

More specifically, we’ll establish a number of criteria for prioritizing portions of habitat to protect. First, we’ll compute statistics related to patch geometry, i.e., the size, shape of a given patch, and discuss how these relate to conservation importance. Then, we’ll examine suites of patches from a connectivity perspective: are there sets of habitat patches that, if selected, can act effectively as a single patch since they are close enough to each other? And finally, we’ll examine factors related to a patch’s viability or protection importance given the likelihood and severity of various threats to that patch.

In examining all these concepts, we’ll have a chance to examine a number of new geospatial tools and approaches that are also applicable to other scenarios, not just habitat patches. The full set of lesson objectives are listed below.

Learning Objectives