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Week 13: Landscape Connectivity and Conservation Prioritization

Core Questions

  • How can landscapes be represented as resistance surfaces and networks?
  • How do least-cost paths, centrality, and fragmentation relate to dispersal?
  • How can connectivity results inform conservation prioritization?

Concepts

  • Landscape connectivity.
  • Resistance surfaces.
  • Least-cost paths.
  • Graphs, nodes, and edges.
  • Connectivity, centrality, fragmentation, and dispersal pathways.
  • Protected areas, complementarity, irreplaceability, and prioritization.
  • Scenario analysis under land-use or climate change.

Python Tools

  • rasterio or rioxarray.
  • NumPy.
  • networkx.
  • optionally scipy.sparse.

Applied Lab

Students turn a raster resistance surface into a graph, calculate shortest paths or connectivity metrics, and compare alternative conservation or prioritization scenarios.

Deliverable

Submit a final project checkpoint with core outputs, a connectivity or prioritization map, and a plan for completing the final analysis.