Habitat Connectivity Mapping
What Does Habitat Connectivity Mean?
Habitat connectivity refers to how easily species can move through the landscape to access the habitats they need for feeding, breeding and shelter. When habitats become fragmented, the ability of wildlife to move and disperse is reduced. This can lead to isolated populations, declining biodiversity and reduced ecosystem resilience. By improving habitat connectivity, we can restore functional ecological networks, allowing species to move more freely, maintain healthy populations and adapt to environmental change.
What Is The Need For Connectivity Modelling?
Nature across Sussex, and the UK as a whole, is in decline. One of the biggest reasons for this is the way our landscapes have become fragmented. Towns, roads and intensive farming have broken up once continuous habitats, leaving isolated patches of nature where wildlife struggles to survive.
The Lawton Review (2010) set out a simple solution: to help nature recover, we need to make habitats:
BIGGER BETTER MORE JOINED-UP
That means:
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Improving the quality of the habitats we already have
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Expanding nature beyond small, isolated fragments
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Reconnecting the landscape so wildlife can move, feed and thrive
This is where habitat connectivity modelling comes in. It helps us understand where the biggest gaps and barriers are, and shows us where restoring habitat will make the biggest difference for wildlife.
UNDERSTANDING THE LANDSCAPE
From the Eyes of Wildlife
We are mapping habitat connectivity across West and East Sussex, the South Downs and High Weald using five “Champion Species” that reflect the broader biodiversity needs of wildlife in the landscape including…
Hedgehogs
Frogs and Toads
Butterflies
Adders
Bats
Representing many species...
The Science Behind the Maps
We combined several different techniques for modelling connectivity, to consider land cover, the dispersal ability of our “champion species”, and species-specific pressures such as light pollution and roads. By overlaying the results of this modelling, we can start to prioritise action in areas of particular fragmentation.
Circuitscape Model
(Resistance Maps)
Circuitscape treats landscapes as resistance maps, where low-resistance areas, based on land use maps, facilitate movement and the high-resistance regions act as barriers.
Movement through resistance surfaces is simulated, tied to behaviour or ecological preferences. It integrates species movement data with climate-informed landscape scenarios to evaluate how corridors may shift under changing conditions.
Condatis Model
(Bottlenecks)
Condatis focuses on the flow of species across landscapes, modelling dispersal pathways and identifying corridors that optimise population persistence. It relies on species-specific dispersal abilities, habitat suitability, and landscape permeability.
Bottlenecks are identified where connective pathways are significantly strained as a limited route for species movement across a landscape.
From Models to Action
Our Models Will Allow Us To...
- Identify gaps in functional connectivity and evidence intervention
- Facilitate intervention, through habitat creation or enhancement in the “gaps”
- Create a fundable landscape based on modelling
- Evidence the need for other interventions, such as green infrastructure
- Storytell and engage audiences with landscape conservation
- Tie together the different scales of land manager involvement with W2W, demonstrating the connectivity we can achieve with collaboration from farms to gardens.
A Collaborative Effort
Experts and practitioners came together to help us understand the complexity of how our landscape is connected. Without them, nature recovery on a landscape scale would not be possible.
