| Abstract | | In recent years, land use planners and conservation scientists have become interested in how to measure, model and map landscape connectivity for plant and wildlife species. Broadly defined, connectivity is a measure of the ability of organisms to move among patches of suitable habitat in the landscape. Conserving connectivity is increasingly important due to rapid land use change, which has led to habitat loss and fragmentation and threatens the persistence of many species. The guiding objectives of our current research on habitat connectivity are to determine how landscape metrics can be used to derive a continuous measure of connectivity across the landscape for large scale habitat connectivity. Work using this approach in the Mayacmas Mountains ecosystem of California will be presented. We plan to combine our landscape connectivity model with existing land use change, economic, species habitat suitability models, and examine how resilient various reserve network scenarios will be to climate change.
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