This map represents a potential Conservation Target (CT) for PFLCC's 'Hardwood Forested Uplands' (HFU) Priority Resource (PR). The potential CT is Connectivity. These layers were created for an initial investigation of potential CT's suggested at brainstorming workshops. The initial investigation entails locating available datasets to address the suggested CT as closely as possible and performing minimal analyses to determine their usefulness. The final set of CT's and their associated datasets will be chosen after targets (e.g., endpoints) are established as a threshold for achieving a conservation success for that CT.
Two available data layers address this potential CT: CLIP 4.0 Greenways layer and TNC's Local Connectedness core layer from their Resiliency Project. Both are available for viewing here (must be viewed separately – turn one off to see the other). Each one offers a slightly different insight into the landscape connectedness of HFU. See also HFU potential CT - Configuration for a slightly different aspect of landscape connectivity.
The CLIP 4.0 Greenways layer was created as part of the Florida Ecological Greenways Network GIS Database. The Florida Ecological Greenways Network (FEGN) identifies opportunities to protect large, intact landscapes important for conserving Florida’s biodiversity and ecosystem services, and serves as a backbone for biodiversity and ecosystem protection efforts in Florida. An important goal of the FEGN is to protect a functionally connected network of public and private conservation lands from the tip of south Florida to the tip of the Florida panhandle while also potentially providing functional connectivity to conservation lands in Georgia and Alabama. Prioritization of the new FEGN base boundary is required to refine priority focal areas and facilitate implementation efforts by the Office of Greenways and Trails and partners and related conservation evaluation processes including the Florida Forever Conservation Needs Assessment. For addition information see the University of Florida, Center for Landscape Conservation Planning, 2015, an/or the CLIP v 4.0 technical report at www.fnai.org/clip_cfm.
The local connectedness layer is part of TNC Resiliency Project that provides insight into potential effects of climate change. A highly permeable landscape promotes resilience by facilitating range shifts and the reorganization of communities. Roads, development, dams, and other structures create resistance that interrupts or redirects movement and, therefore, lowers the permeability. Maintaining a connected landscape is the most widely cited strategy in the scientific literature for building resilience and has been suggested as an explanation for why there were few extinctions during the last period of comparable rapid climate change. This metric is an important component of resilience because it indicates whether a process is likely to be disrupted or how much access a species has to the micro-climates within its given neighborhood.
The original TNC layer was created using resistant kernel analysis, developed and run by Brad Compton using software developed by the UMASS CAPS program. Each cell of a resistance grid is coded with a resistance value base on land cover and roads. To calculate this metric, resistance weights were assigned to the elements of a land cover map, based on land use, roads and railroads, and some very general differences in land cover types (forested vs. plantation forest, wetland vs. upland, etc. The local connectedness analysis was done on the resulting resistance surface at a 90-m cell size and evaluated connectedness for each cell out to 3 km. Results were score from 0 (least connected) to 100 (most connected). Actual scores had a mean of 37.27 and standard deviation of 20.14 for the southeastern region.
For more detailed information on the Resiliency Project, see https://www.conservationgateway.org/ConservationByGeography/NorthAmerica/UnitedStates/edc/reportsdata/terrestrial/resilience/Pages/default.aspx.
For a description of the priority resource layer, see the HFU Priority Resource layer found in this gallery.
For this initial analysis, the greenways layer was resampled from 30x30m to 15x15m cell size to match the HFU priority resource layer. The local connectedness layer was projected to a custom projection, , to match the other layers as well. The HFU PR layer was used as a mask to extract pixels from each of the connectivity datasets to get values within the priority resource. For preliminary summaries of the extracted values, see also the 'Hardwood Forested Uplands’ webinar (in pdf form) located within this gallery.
