3.5 Landscape Connectivity across four levels of dispersal
abilities:
For both species, the percentage of the landscape, correlation length
and largest patch index of connected habitat was predicted to increase
significantly, and the number of patches was predicted to decrease, with
increasing dispersal ability (Table4). Across the four dispersal
thresholds and different models, we predict that between 17 and 30 % of
the landscape contains connected habitat patches for gray wolf. For
golden jackal, 13 to 29 % of the landscape contains connected habitat
patches. We predicted that isolated patches for grey wolf and golden
jackal ranged between 4-35 and 9-49 respectively across dispersal
thresholds and modeling methods (Table4).
Table 4: FRAGSTATS results for four metrics includes: number of
individual core patches (NP) largest patch index (LPI), percentage of
landscape in connected habitat (PLAND) and correlation length of core
habitats (CL). For grey wolf and golden jackal in four levels of
dispersal ability (50,000, 100,000, 150,000 and 200000). The core
habitats were defined as contiguous units with resistant kernel values
>10% of the highest resistance kernel for the species.