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The goal of this project is to identify routes for wildlife migration between protected lands, which then become candidates for
new protected lands and priority for conservation efforts. The approach to this project is to gain insight into the suitability of land for
wildlife, then calculate how far and how difficult it would be to reach the nearest protected land. Finally, an optimal path will be
calculated between the protected areas, which identifies candidate lands for conservation efforts.
The final report for this analysis is linked at the bottom of this page.
To visualize the suitability of land for wildlife, the following factors were taken into consideration: proximity to highways, ruggedness of terrain, population density, and the type of land cover. The map layout to the left describes why these variables were considered and what weight each had on the final land suitability analysis (wildness index).
The map layout below shows the wildness index and the variables after being converted to a common scale for the weighted overlay analysis.
The wildness index shows us a easy to follow 1-5 scale on how suitable the land is for wildlife to migrate across. But this is only the first half of the analysis.
Now the question is how difficut is it to travel between the suitable land areas?
The model shows the analysis done to find the accumulated distance across Washington State and the optimal path between protected areas.
The protected lands (Core Habitat Areas) are used to create the Euclidean distance (nearest_protected_area) which shows the straight-line distance to the nearest protected area. This does not account for how difficult it is to travel. Instead, it acts as a control to see how different the weighted distance (accumulated distance) may be. The accumulated distance is the Euclidian distance weighted by the cost values. The cost values are the inverse wildness index which show the resistance to wildlife movement. This calculation illustrates on the map below how difficult it would be to get to the nearest protected area due to factors like high population density, unsuitable land cover, and high proximity to highways.
Finally, the optimal path is calculated which shows the path most suitable for wildlife to travel between protected areas.
The optimal path helps identify the land between the large protected areas that should be considered as candidates for new protected land and priority for conservation efforts. It is along this line that wildlife are most likely to take to migrate between protected areas in response to climate change and other disturbances. It’s vital to expand the protection of land to this path line as much as possible to promote necessary migratory responses, proper gene flow, and overall habitat conservation.
A more in depth exploration of this analysis can be found in the original report.
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