Cats, connectivity and conservation: incorporating data sets and integrating scales for wildlife management

摘要

1. Understanding resource selection and quantifying habitat connectivity are fundamental to conservation planning for both land-use and species management plans. However, data sets available to management authorities for resource selection and connectivity analyses are often highly limited and fragmentary. As a result, measuring connectivity is challenging, and often poorly integrated within conservation planning and wildlife management. To exacerbate the challenge, scale-dependent resource use makes inference across scales problematic, resource use is often modelled in areas where the species is not present, and connectivity is typically measured using a source-to-sink approach, erroneously assuming animals possess predefined destinations.