To address our goal of mapping Vancouver Island wolf habitat connectivity, we chose the open-access tool ‘Linkage Mapper’. Linkage Mapper is comprised of open source Python scripts shared in an ArcGIS toolbox. It uses GIS maps of core habitat areas and resistances to identify and map linkages between core areas, and has been used in numerous scientific wildlife studies (Liu et al, 2018; Oliviera-Junior et al., 2020; Shi et al., 2018; Tobgay & Mahavik, 2020). As this tool uses an older version of Python made for ArcMap, we used ArcMap instead of ArcGIS Pro to carry out our analysis. This tool requires two inputs: a resistance raster (indicating levels of difficulty for the species to move through each cell), and a shapefile containing polygons of the ‘core’ habitat areas of the species. The main steps to create these inputs and carry out the analysis are as follows:
GEOB 370 Final Project by Rebecca McDonald (48206163) and Hannah Bates (21319223)
