Enhancing connectivity is the most often-cited adaptation strategy for addressing climate change. Not surprisingly, many efforts have been made at both local and regional scales to develop connectivity plans—maps that show priority corridors for linking separated habitat patches, conservation areas, or more intact tracts of land. Although these maps depict the general areas through which a species might most easily move to get from one location to another, they do not provide planners with any guidance on where specifically to act to enhance connectivity. Here, we prioritize lands in the Columbia Plateau for restoration efforts to enhance connectivity for the Townsend’s ground squirrel. Our approach takes into account three factors. First, by analyzing a continuous cost-weighted distance surface, we identify specific areas or barriers that if restored would provide the greatest reduction in the cost-weighted distance between pairs of large habitat patches. Second, we assess the monetary cost of restoring those areas based on land and restoration costs. Third, we assess the potential threat of suburban and exurban development on connectivity using projected changes in housing density.
Results/Conclusions
We identify a set of areas that likely provide the largest return on restoration investment for promoting connectivity for the ground squirrel. These areas include both potential road crossings and sites for the restoration of agricultural lands. Differences between sets of priority areas based solely on restoration effectiveness and those based on all three factors demonstrate the trade-offs between effectiveness, cost, and the threat of development. In addition, our results highlight potential areas for focusing the collaborative efforts of the Arid Lands Initiative—a cooperative group of government agencies and non-governmental organizations established to promote ecological function in Washington state’s shrub-steppe landscape.