Landscape and population connectivity

Conservation area design (CAD) is being used by many landscape-scale conservation efforts in western North America to establish geographic priorities and to raise awareness within the scientific, practitioner, and lay communities of the importance of critical areas. However, CAD techniques currently cannot evaluate factors that allow species and their resources to persist over time. These factors include land-cover connectivity and the resilience of reserve networks to ecological processes such as fire. Several new methods for CAD are emerging that have the potential to improve greatly on past methods. These new methods are unfamiliar to most practitioners, and no comparative evaluation of their usefulness in different contexts exists. Participants will test and compare new tools by applying them to conservation-planning challenges in several geographic areas in North America. Participants also will develop a manual that evaluates new software tools for connectivity analysis, with guidelines for use of those tools. Ultimately, the group will develop a software toolkit and guidelines for its use that would be applicable to landscape-scale conservation planning in any region.