Webinar Event 2024 Talk 2 Summary: Co-designing an Indicator of Habitat Connectivity for England
The second talk of the event was delivered by Dr Nick Isaac from the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH). Nick leads a research team in the Biodiversity Science Area, who use theory and statistical models to address applied questions about the natural environment.
Nick and his team worked closely with Defra and Natural England to design an indicator to measure habitat connectivity in England for the Outcome Indicator Framework of Defra’s 25-year environment plan. The indicator that the team were focused on, called ‘D1’, addresses the quality, quantity, and connectivity of wildlife-rich habitats- crucial for tracking the progress towards one of the 25-year plan’s aims to recover wildlife populations. The UKCEH project concentrated on building a metric to measure the spatial configuration component of the D1 indicator.
The first stage involved identifying tools for measuring habitat connectivity at the national scale. The process generated a longlist of tools, each with different strengths: some focused on landscape structure, while others addressed ecological processes. Condatis was notable for bridging these approaches, as it incorporates both habitat structure and dispersal processes.
Nick explained that all shortlisted tools were evaluated in expert workshops held in 2019. The evaluation criteria included transparency, practicality, affordability, flexibility, sensitivity, specificity, representativeness, data availability, data quality, and ease of communication. The workshop yielded three candidate tools (one of which was Condatis), that represent and conceptualise connectivity in different ways.
In the next phase, the team tested the tools to assess their effectiveness as indicators of habitat connectivity changes. They selected three landscapes from different counties and modelled scenarios with additional habitat, which could either be aggregated around existing habitat or widely dispersed.
The evaluation focused on how each tool responded to habitat addition. Condatis showed an increase in its speed metric with more habitat, with the rate of increase depending on the amount and distribution of added habitat. It performed consistently across all landscapes and scenarios. Based on these findings, the UKCEH team recommended Condatis to Defra and Natural England as the preferred tool for the habitat connectivity index. The work was published in 2022 in a special issue of Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.
