Framework facilitates designing effective wildlife corridors

Description

Wildlife populations in fragmented landscapes experience reduced gene flow, lose genetic diversity over time, and ultimately face greater extinction risk. Improving connectivity in fragmented landscapes is now a major focus of conservation biology. Designing effective wildlife corridors for this purpose requires understanding of how landscapes shape gene flow. Station scientists developed a framework that uses expert opinion as a starting point and then systematically either validates the assumptions of expert opinion or identifies a peak of support for a new model more highly related to genetic isolation. This approach also accounts for interactions between variables, allows for nonlinear responses, and excludes variables that reduce model performance. Station scientists demonstrated its utility on a population of mountain goats inhabiting a fragmented landscape in the Cascade Range, Washington. Wildlife planners with Washington Department of Transportation are using this tool to assess connectivity along the I-90 freeway in Washington.