Key landscape connections under urban growth

In partnership with South Atlantic Landscape Conservation Cooperative members, we assessed current and projected connectivity for three species that inhabit bottomland hardwoods throughout the southeastern US: black bear (Ursus americanus), Rafinesque’s big-eared bat (Corynorhinus rafinesquii), and timber rattlesnake (Crotalus horridus). For each species, we mapped important habitat connections between core patches of habitat using three different modeling approaches (Connectivity Analysis Toolkit (CAT), Circuitscape, and Linkage Mapper) that incorporated three types of resistance layers (expert opinion, niche modeling, and empirical data for the black bear only). The result was 21 sets of important connections, one for each of the [...]