Aquatic connectivity was modeled across the entire Landscape Conservation Cooperative geography at the catchmentand watershed scales. To evaluate aquatic connectivity, the density of dams and road crossings was used as these areknown to disrupt connectivity within aquatic systems. Connectivity data for dams and road crossings werecreated from the StreamCat database. The density of dams and roads was multiplied, at the catchment and watershedlevels, by the relative influence of each connectivity variable in the Boosted Regression Tree (BRT) models and then the connectivity variables were averaged. A single aquatic connectivity score was then assigned to each catchment. This aquaticconnectivity score was used to modify the boundary relations between catchments so that highly connectedcatchments were more likely to be selected together in optimization.
