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A well-managed and operational Conservation Gateway is in our future! Marketing, Conservation, and Science have partnered on a plan to rebuild the Gateway into the organization’s enterprise content management system (AEM), with a planned launch of a minimal viable product in late 2024. If you’re interested in learning more about the project, reach out to megan.sheehan@tnc.org for more info!

Two methods to model landscape permeability

Facilitating the large-scale ecological reorganization expected from climate change requires a broader and more inclusive analysis, appropriate to thinking about the transformation of whole landscapes.  As part of the terrestrial resilience project, TNC developed two separate analytical models to assess different aspects of its local and regional nature: local connectedness and regional flow patterns.  These two layers compose permeability.
 
Permeability, rather than being based on individual species movements, is a measure of landscape structure, incorporating the hardness of barriers, the connectedness of natural cover, and the arrangement of land uses. Permeability is a surface that reveals the implications of the physical landscape structure with respect to the continuous flow of natural processes, including not only the dispersal and recruitment of plants and animals, but the rearrangement of existing communities.  Local connectedness starts with a focal cell and measures the resistance to flows outward in all directions of the cell's local neighborhood.  Regional flow patterns look at the broader flow patterns across the entire region, measuring how these patterns become slowed, redirected, or channeled due to the spatial arrangement of impediments. 

Permeability data and documentation is taken from a larger report, "Resilient Sites for Terrestrial Conservation in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic Region", which can be downloaded here.

Download the Data