Assessing Highway Permeability for the Restoration of Landscape Connectivity between Protected Areas in the Basque Country, Northern Spain

Key connectors in protected forest area networks and the impact of highways: A transnational case study from the Cantabrian Range to the Western Alps (SW Europe)

“…4) allows us to point out areas in which it is critical to diagnose (with further analysis and field observations at finer scales) the permeability of the roadways (Clevenger and Wierzchowski, 2006). These junctions should contain a sufficient density of adequate crossings for fauna (Gurrutxaga et al, 2010b). Particularly for those highways that were constructed years ago with little consideration to their permeability for ecological fluxes, corrective defragmentation measures should be prioritized and implemented (Iuell et al, 2003;van der Grift and Pouwels, 2006).…”

Isolation by distance, resistance and/or clusters? Lessons learned from a forest‐dwelling carnivore inhabiting a heterogeneous landscape

“…Indeed, this area has been previously identified as one of the critical connectivity areas in the framework of the Basque connectivity network, specifically designed for forest species (Gurrutxaga et al . ,b). Moreover, recent research in the Basque Country has shown that gene flow of pine marten is facilitated through natural vegetation and is diminished in human‐dominated land uses such as agricultural, urban areas and linear anthropogenic barriers such as highways (Ruiz‐González et al .…”

Does regional landscape connectivity influence the location of roe deer roadkill hotspots?

“…As roe deer roadkill locations validate the landscape graph of the roe deer, this graph could be useful for quantifying potential flows of individuals on links crossing future linear infrastructures. It would mean optimal crossing structure locations for this species could be identified that could benefit other forest species too (Gurrutxaga et al 2010;Downs and Horner 2012). BLandscape^group included proportions of forests and proportion of cultivated fields; BRoad^group included road width and distance to a crossing structure; BConnectivity^referred to Current Flow metric for a dispersal distance of 3000 m…”

“…Several network measures reviewed in Rayfield et al (2011) have been developed to quantify habitat connectivity on graph structure (e.g., area weighted flux, betweenness centrality, probability of connectivity), and circuit theory has recently been applied to spatial graphs (McRae 2012). Recent studies have extended these methods to modeling the best locations for wildlife crossing structures so as to enhance landscape connectivity impacted by linear infrastructures (Gurrutxaga et al 2010;Downs and Horner 2012), but none has dealt with WVC. However, approaches dealing with landscape connectivity are reported to potentially support transportation planning in locating WVC hotspots (Carroll et al 2012) and to more effectively focus mitigation measures to reduce the collision rate on these road sections (Coulon et al 2008;Fu et al 2010;Rudnick et al 2012).…”