Integrating landscape changes into ecological connectivity: What-if flow connectivity

摘要

There’s an arising need for theoretical and methodological tools to predict how much and how landscapechanges will impact animal movements. In fact, conservation planning in the face of landscape changesrequires realistic predictions of impacts on biotic flows and species dispersals. The goal of What-if FlowConnectivity is to simulate what happens to biotic shifts over real landscapes if landscape changes happen.What-if FC calculates the spatial divergence of the biotic flow with respect to the inertial (i.e. where nolandscape changes are considered) flow due to landscape changes. So doing, What-if Flow Connectivity notonly predicts the most likely biotic routes imposed by landscape changes to one species, but also estimates theimpact of such changes in terms of spatial divergence and differential shift effort with respect to the inertial(no landscape changes) scenario. What-if Flow Connectivity comes with the software Connectivity-Lab whoseoutputs are the vectors of the faunal (inertial and what-if) movements plus the statistics of the movement(inertial and what-if) efforts.