Animal Movements and Connectivity

Project description
Following the adoption of the Post-2020 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, there is a clear science-policy need to protect habitat connectivity. In this context, we have developed an R tool that can assess the habitat connectivity at fine spatial grain and at the extent of an entire ecoregion, through an analytical, multi-indicator and multispecies approach. Learn more about this tool on GitHub.

Fragmented habitats also limit our ability to understand how wildlife move across landscapes.
Understanding these movements is crucial for conservation, and the increasing availability of telemetry data enables rigorous modeling approaches. However, the current paradigm for modeling telemetry data & environmental data together, step selection, has some crucial limitations such as a lack of path dependence between observed fixes, which is especially problematic given the increasing fragmentation of the environments they navigate. Some paths are far more likely than others, regardless of the habitat suitability of the destination. This project develops an alternative "path propagation" framework that incorporates this path dependence, greatly improving our ability to understand fine-scale movements.
This project unfolds across interconnected studies that scale from individual behavior to landscape-scale conservation planning; after setting up the initial path propagation model we aim to incorporate temporal and social dynamics and population-level demographic differences. These insights will inform models of functional connectivity (how effectively animals can move between habitat patches), serving as a tool for designing wildlife corridors and predicting population responses to landscape change. By moving from individual-level movement mechanics to population-level connectivity patterns, this framework offers both theoretical advances and practical applications for protecting wide-ranging species in fragmented landscapes.

PRISM project leader: Shriram Varadarajan

Publications: Oehri, J., Wood, S.L.R., Touratier, E., Leung, B., and Gonzalez, A. 2024. Rapid evaluation of habitat connectivity change to safeguard multispecies persistence in human-transformed landscapes. Biodiversity Conserv 33, 4043–4071. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-024-02938-2.