PARENT SESSION
Oral Session - Conservation Planning Chair(s): Theobald, David¹, ¹ Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO
Thursday, April 1, 2004 8:00 AM - 12:00 PM Apollo Room 2

Modeling functional landscape connectivity using effective distance and graph theory. ^*THEOBALD, DAVID M. , ¹ Natural Resource Ecology Lab, Fort Collins, CO , USA

ABSTRACT- Functional connectivity recognizes that individuals, species or processes respond functionally (or behaviorally) to the physical structure of a landscape, so that connectivity is specific to the landscape and species/individual/process under investigation. Here I describe a model that implements this perspective and allows a user to parameterize habitat quality, minimum patch size, matrix quality, and movement ability. For each inter-patch relationship, a distribution of distances (in addition to the least-cost path distance) is computed providing a more robust estimate of effective inter-patch distance. These effective distances are stored in an adjacency list database, which provides the basic input for graph-theoretic analyses to be computed using probability measures. I will present results from an analysis of landscape connectivity for lynx in Colorado, USA.

KEY WORDS: linkages, functional connectivity, graph theory, GIS, adjacency list