Associate Professor Seoul National University, Republic of Korea
Connectivity is a key concern in natural resource planning. Approaches based on connectivity analysis have been recently proposed and are being increasingly applied to guide landscape conservation and restoration. The goal of this study is to identify priority areas for ecological conservation and restoration using landscape connectivity analysis that increase ecological and public benefits. Firstly, we chose the Seoul city as a case study to present a sequential process to prioritize patches for forest conservation and afforestation. We ranked existing and candidate forest patches based on their contribution to forest landscape connectivity, according to the delta values for the PC index in the software Conefor Sensinode 2.6. Secondly, we chose Suwon city as a case study for quantifying the geographic priorities for conservation and restoration in the development of urban green space networks from both biodiversity conservation and the provision of green space concerns. We incorporated the protected area status and optimized distance buffer of urban green spaces for people to create a new resistance surface, and then used Linkage Mapper as the primary analytical tool to model urban green network. Here we show: 1) despite the fact that the most important patches for conservation in Seoul were all consistently large, the individual size of the patches was not closely correlated with their importance for connectivity; 2) small habitat patches ( < 20 ha) could potentially play a large and important role in connectivity, and the 50 most important small patches in six land use types were identified to provide a guide for effective afforestation efforts in Seoul; 3) 88 corridors are identified, with a total length of 189.2 km, with a relatively high density in the central part of Suwon city; 4) plaza and roadside green spaces are the main types of green space that increased the green space provision benefits, but they only have a weak effect on improving biodiversity. In conclusion, our study suggests that connectivity analyses can simplify and systematize the complex urban landscape, thus guiding urban planning management in increasingly fragmented landscapes. We expect that this study could pave the way to prioritizing conservation and restoration initiatives from the standpoint of ecology and the public.
