3.3 Connectivity
Our connectivity simulation modeling for grey wolf revealed high connectivity areas in the Southern parts of the study area. A total of 25.18 % of the extent of this corridor network is covered with PAs (Figure 5 and Table 3). Most of the identified corridor networks for the golden jackal occurred in the Southern parts of the study area. Of the predicted corridor paths of the species, 19.11 % are covered by Protected Areas Networks (Figure 5 and Table 3). Our analysis showed that most predicted corridor paths for both species are bisected multiple times by roads (Figure 5 and Table 3).
Fig 5. UNICOR corridor pathways for the golden jackal (A) and the grey wolf (B) in Central Iran.
Table 3: The extent and percent of corridors covered by current conservation networks for golden jackal and grey wolf in Central Iran. The median value of habitat suitability for presence points was used as threshold to define the highly suitable habitats.