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Two measures of landscape-graph connectivity: assessment across gradients in area and configuration

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Abstract

Landscape connectivity is critical to species persistence in the face of habitat loss and fragmentation. Graph theory is a well-defined method for quantifying connectivity that has tremendous potential for ecology, but its application has been limited to a small number of conservation scenarios, each with a fixed proportion of habitat. Because it is important to distinguish changes in habitat configuration from changes in habitat area in assessing the potential impacts of fragmentation, we investigated two metrics that measure these different influences on connectivity. The first metric, graph diameter, has been advocated as a useful measure of habitat configuration. We propose a second area-based metric that combines information on the amount of connected habitat and the amount of habitat in the largest patch. We calculated each metric across gradients in habitat area and configuration using multifractal neutral landscapes. The results identify critical connectivity thresholds as a function of the level of fragmentation and a parallel is drawn between the behavior of graph theory metrics and those of percolation theory. The combination of the two metrics provides a means for targeting sites most at risk of suffering low potential connectivity as a result of habitat fragmentation.

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Acknowledgments

Comments and the LANDGRAPHS code provided by Dean Urban (Duke University) are greatly appreciated. We thank Adam Bazinet and Mike Cummings of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies for technical support. Funding was provided by the National Park Service, NCR I&M Network through the Chesapeake Watershed Cooperative Ecosystem Unit, Task Agreement J3992050104 and by the University of Maryland College Park, College of Agriculture and Natural Resource Sciences, Department of Natural Resource Sciences and Landscape Architecture.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Appalachian Laboratory, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, Frostburg, MD, 21532, USA

    Joseph R. Ferrari & Todd R. Lookingbill

  2. Department of Plant Science and Landscape Architecture and Department of Entomology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 20742, USA

    Maile C. Neel

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  1. Joseph R. Ferrari
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  2. Todd R. Lookingbill
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  3. Maile C. Neel
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Correspondence to Joseph R. Ferrari.

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Ferrari, J.R., Lookingbill, T.R. & Neel, M.C. Two measures of landscape-graph connectivity: assessment across gradients in area and configuration. Landscape Ecol 22, 1315–1323 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-007-9121-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-007-9121-7

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