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A comparison of metrics predicting landscape connectivity for a highly interactive species along an urban gradient in Colorado, USA

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Abstract

Many organisms persist in fragmented habitat where movement between patches is essential for long-term demographic and genetic stability. In the absence of direct observation of movement, connectivity or isolation metrics are useful to characterize potential patch-level connectivity. However, multiple metrics exist at varying levels of complexity, and empirical data on species distribution are rarely used to compare performance of metrics. We compared 12 connectivity metrics of varying degrees of complexity to determine which metric best predicts the distribution of prairie dog colonies along an urban gradient of 385 isolated habitat patches in Denver, Colorado, USA. We found that a modified version of the incidence function model including area-weighting of patches and a cost-weighted distance surface best predicted occupancy, where we assumed roads were fairly impermeable to movement, and low-lying drainages provided dispersal corridors. We also found this result to be robust to a range of cost weight parameters. Our results suggest that metrics should incorporate both patch area and the composition of the surrounding matrix. These results provide guidance for improved landscape habitat modeling in fragmented landscapes and can help identify target habitat for conservation and management of prairie dogs in urban systems.

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Acknowledgments

We thank J. Norman for assistance with computing the GIS-based landscape metrics, L. Berkley and E. Lee for help gathering data, to two anonymous reviwers. Funding was provided by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, a University of Wisconsin Graduate Fellowship, the Denver Zoological Foundation, the Milwaukee Zoological Foundation, the Rocky Mountain Goats Foundation, Sigma Xi, Prairie Biotic Research, and the Humane Society of the United States. M. Antolin, J. Detling, and R. Reading provided useful comments on an early draft of this manuscript.

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  1. Seth B. Magle

    Present address: 70 Science Hall, Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, 53706, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, 80523-1474, USA

    Seth B. Magle & Kevin R. Crooks

  2. Department of Human Dimensions of Natural Resources and the Natural Resource Ecology Lab, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, 80523-1480, USA

    David M. Theobald

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  1. Seth B. Magle
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Correspondence to Seth B. Magle.

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Magle, S.B., Theobald, D.M. & Crooks, K.R. A comparison of metrics predicting landscape connectivity for a highly interactive species along an urban gradient in Colorado, USA. Landscape Ecol 24, 267–280 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-008-9304-x

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