An animal’s ability to move across the landscape it inhabits is key to its survival and reproduction, ultimately affecting population dynamics, the distribution of species, and ecosystem function. Identifying landscape conditions, structures, and processes that facilitate these movements is therefore vital for conservation. Maintaining landscape connectivity—the degree to which landscapes facilitate the movement of individual animals and gene flow—has become a global conservation priority to mitigate widespread landscape modifications by humans, which has impacted biodiversity.
Today, most humans live in urban areas, and urbanization is considered a global threat to biodiversity. Urban areas frequently contain high densities of people and large areas of impervious surfaces and built infrastructure, both of which are generally viewed as inhospitable to wildlife. Yet despite their ubiquity and negative impacts on biodiversity, biologists have increasingly recognized urban areas as unique ecosystems with potential for biodiversity conservation and provision of ecosystem services. Urban ecosystems are highly heterogeneous, often with immediate transitions between adjacent land-cover types, and numerous discrete patches of habitat may occur within relatively small areas.
Tucson is a particularly notable example of the advantages and disadvantages of urbanization for wildlife. Tucson is a large city—the Tucson metropolitan area contains roughly one million people and its built environment contains a dense road network, many multi-story buildings, and pervasive impervious surfaces. However, Tucson is surrounded by many large protected areas, there are large arteries of reasonably intact habitat through town in the form of flood-prone desert washes, many yards and parks contain native vegetation, and many species within the region’s unique fauna are commonly seen by residents, including javelinas, Gambel’s quail, coyotes, and roadrunners. Moreover, local governments, wildlife managers, and environmental groups are keen to invest substantial resources to increase wildlife connectivity across Tucson and the region surrounding it.
Despite this, our understanding of landscape connectivity across Tucson and the region surrounding it is limited. As an initial step toward better understanding landscape connectivity in the Tucson region, we are using camera traps placed across the region to map the presence of individual species across the urban footprint, identify factors that are influencing species presence in different areas of town, and assess the efficacy of currently existing wildlife crossing infrastructure for increasing connectivity.
We are also compiling our data and camera trap data sets in a database that can be used by other researchers and wildlife managers in the future (with permission from data owners). More information on this effort can be found here, and researchers and managers can request data here.
Project funding has been generously provided by:
