Author(s)

F. Jordán

Abstract

Quantifying landscape connectivity: key patches and key corridors F. Jordiin Department of Plant Taxonomy and Ecology, Eotvos University, Budapest, Hungary Abstract The problems of habitat loss and fragmentation call for an understanding of how ecological landscapes serve the needs of inhabiting metapopulations. Questions of extreme importance are (1) how connected are landscape graphs in nature, (2) how to measure this connectivity mathematically, and (3) how do the spatial elements of the landscape contribute to the maintenance of connectivity. I propose a landscape graph analysis where the positional importance of individual habitat patches (nodes) and ecological corridors (links) is quantified. This refers to the role of these spatial elements in maintaining landscape connectivity, i.e. how will the landscape graph be damaged after losing its patch or corridor in question. Our approach takes into account both structure and function; functional aspects are expressed by the assessed quality

Keywords