One of the biggest problems in ecology and conservation biology today is the habitat fragmentation that results from land use change and anthropogenic activities. Conservation corridors, strips of habitat that connect larger patches of fragmented habitat, have been proposed as a solution to facilitate landscape connectivity and enable species dispersal and migration. Less certain is how different conservation strategies, and the variation in spatial patterning they create, impact landscape connectivity and available corridor placement. The objective of our study was to evaluate corridor opportunities generated by differing conservation strategies on a landscape in central North Carolina, examining how the spatial configuration of these sites affects landscape connectivity, corridor siting, and permeability to avian species. We used LANDIS-II, a landscape modeling framework, to model three common strategies in the conservation toolbox- habitat restoration, protected area designation for intact habitat, and clumping around conservation cores in the piedmont and sandhills ecoregions of North Carolina. We evaluated connectivity opportunities created by each conservation strategy under moderate climate and land use change scenarios through a least cost path analysis for 8 avian species archetypes to assess corridor opportunities and landscape permeability for each conservation strategy.
Results/Conclusions
Our results showed that the variation in spatial pattern created by differing conservation strategies influenced landscape connectivity and had an effect on opportunities for potential corridor placement in central North Carolina. Our results also displayed a difference in landscape permeability across avian archetypes for each of the three conservation strategies. Significant emphasis has been placed on identifying and prioritizing opportunities for connectivity between the sandhills and piedmont ecoregions of North Carolina. Our study shows that conservation strategy selection and placement on the landscape will strongly affect connectivity potential between these two ecoregions for avian species. These results can inform the selection of conservation strategies that maximize landscape connectivity and optimize corridor establishment, empowering land managers to select conservation approaches that facilitate species dispersal and migration in central North Carolina. This is crucial for government agencies, nonprofits, and private land owners seeking to conduct conservation actions that maximize landscape connectivity and increase landscape permeability for avian species.