Connectivity matters: Modelling home range connectivity to improve urban biodiversity
Urban biodiversity strongly contributes to human well-being and is, therefore, integral to a sustainable and healthy city. It is well-known that most animals occur in parks and gardens with plentiful resources, but their occurrence in sparsely vegetated urban areas depends on the spatial configuration of resources and barriers determining the animals’ resource access. Resource accessibility can be analysed using connectivity models that describe how easily animals can move in a landscape.
Previous research has suggested that in barrier-rich urban landscapes, connectivity impacts species movement, but the question of how connectivity at a small scale affects an animal’s occurrence across a city remains open. This PhD thesis aims to develop a connectivity modelling framework for an animal’s home range movement, i.e. the daily movements for resource allocation, to better understand resource accessibility and its importance for the occurrence of urban animals. First, I will develop a modelling framework that will integrate a description of the urban landscape focussing on a small spatial extent and fine resolution of urban elements. I will then derive and test a parametrization procedure that allows to obtain important model parameters from empirical data. Second, I will test if this modelling framework leads to plausible and robust results when parametrized by widely available presence-absence instead of movement data and used at a coarser modelling resolution. Third, I will analyse the relationship between species occurrence and the spatial configuration of the urban landscape by comparing the connectivity of multiple species in the same and in different cities. Finally, using artificial intelligence, I aim to test whether the model can be used to optimize an urban resource network for multiple species.
This research fills a gap in the understanding of small-scale animal movements and their importance for animal occurrence by providing a framework for modelling small-scale connectivity in barrier-rich landscapes. This thesis will bring important missing knowledge on the ecology of animal species in the urban environment, contribute to the scientific development of connectivity modelling for biodiversity conservation and support planners and policy-makers in designing sustainable and biodiverse cities.