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Reminder that we update the website: http://www.njfishandwildlife.com/ensp/connectivity_proj.htm with new information, project updates, etc. regularly. Any suggestions are welcome on how to make the website more user friendly. 2
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See the draft list of terrestrial species (terrestrial_spc_list_draft.pdf) on the website under Working Group/Core Teams/Mapping. There are still remaining questions about whether some of the species on the list should be on it. We are assembling a species subteam as part of the mapping core team that can work to get more input and make recommendations so we can finalize the list. 4
Rodentia and Soricomorpha were also included with the Low mobility small fauna guild. 5
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More details are asked and collected re: locational data such as locational accuracy, dates, # of locations, extent, etc. The list of questions asked has been posted on the website under the Mapping team. Again, the species subteam will hopefully help flesh these data out and put them in a summary format that can be used by the working group and eventually in our methodology report. 7
Folks at the meeting mentioned that there are likely more sources of telemetry data out there. This is part of the reason for forming a species subteam, to help seek out additional sources of data. 8
I just used the Highlands Region because it s a small regioner area than statewide within which to try the tools, and I work in an office with Highlands species experts, so easy access to feedback. However, we will need to consider whether or not to break down the analysis by region and if so, how will we define the regions? 9
A 30m cell size was not a problem for the core delineation tools. The corridor modeling toolset is a bit more intensive and took approximately 20 minutes to build corridors for 8 cores, but there are many different options to select from, and this is just based on one experimental run. 10
The values I used are in the same place as this pdf and called DRAFT_LUCAT_GFMod_w_notes.pdf. The variables and values Washington used can be found in the same folder and is called: ColumbiaPlateauEcoregion_2012 Appendix_C.pdf Washington gave open water a condition value of.9 (the same as forest, wetlands, etc.) in their condition value raster, used to delineate cores, because they didn t want to risk excluding areas as cores that had a body of open water surrounded by habitat with high landscape integrity scores. On the other hand, for their resistance raster, they did give open water a low value (.5) because it can be an impediment to movement for many species. Ag given a value of.3 (same as Washington) Mtg discussion: Pinelands came under a lot of criticism for not including any agriculture in the ecological assessment. This is a valid criticism since there are many months of a year during which fields aren t being used and some types of ag can be good wildlife habitat. Could treat ag differently depending on patch size. In Landscape Project, just small patches of ag get valued by bobcats. Could do something similar where small patches are given larger values than large patches. 11
Washington included housing density values as described in the first table. They derived them from the US Census 2000 data. I m not that familiar with census data, but it seems too coarse for our purposes and we also have a great lulc dataset capturing residential. Instead, I valued all residential the same (mixed, high density, medium density, low density, single unit) and then calculated the percentage of residential within a 250m radius circle. Mtg discussion: This way treat all residential the same. Could weight using residential density and/or impervious surface. Consider treating all development this way rather than just residential Could include commercial services and other types of development with the high density residential weight if decide to weight Could try a decay function so a continuous variable rather than discrete As is, 2 categories of residential have higher values than ag. Restoration is possible on ag to a more suitable habitat type, but much less so where there is housing/impervious surface. 250m radius just chosen without much justification. It s reasonable, but could also be too big perhaps so should try a smaller size as well. What buffer do we need to give residential/development. 12
I found 2 railroad datasets that seems reasonable complete. The US rails looks good, but there are some breaks in the coverage that likely aren t accurate, so will need to fix if we use them. I called transit rail active and US rails not included in the transit rail coverage as inactive, but surely not true. Mtg discussion: If we are able to find an accurate inactive coverage, that doesn t necessarily mean won t be active again. Might be better to include abandoned railroads as inactive if can find that coverage, if those are less likely to become active again. Will see what DVRPC has. Traffic or no traffic, railroads can act as impediments to movement for many small species like amphibians. Road curbs can as well, but not all curbs are a problem whereas almost all rails are a problem. (There are ways to mitigate and create passage) 13
Mtg discussion: Would be better to use road volume many studies have shown that is the main factor influencing impact on wildlife. However, DOT has it for state roads and some county roads, but counties seem to have varying information. Some have data, but it is just related to point where measurement was taken and can t be extrapolated to a section of roadway, which is what we d need. Applied like Washington and it clearly seems like buffers are too big hardly anything left in NJ (see next slide)! Washington valued roads such that core areas would not include even any local roads, although they did allow for low densities of low use local roads. Will need to consider changing buffer sizes and values applied to roadways. We don t have accurate coverages of low use roads. In Pinelands they found that there wasn t a good sand road coverage so couldn t use them. Pinelands measured a subset of roads to estimate width of different types of roads. Maybe won t matter for us if we use a 30m cell size all road centerlines treated as such? Does it make sense to include all large bridges (would need to figure out threshold size) as passageways for terrestrial wildlife? Many do provide dry passage, and it d be nice to have the corridor modeling aim for them in those cases as breaks in roads, but not sure that s accurate. In this iteration I used bridge over water category from lulc, but DOT does have a bridge shapefile. I haven t been able to get metadata from them to know what the attributes mean yet. 14
bridge over water should be included with water because streams in the lulc are actually broken by them. 14
Refer to second point in previous slide 15
Did not include these variables in this iteration. Should we in the future? If we included riparian, should we include ridgelines? Possibly riparian and ridgeline as.95?? 16
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This is result #1 cores are black outlined in white. This was using threshold size and value inputs very similar to what WA had used. Obviously, those input aren t going to work. 20
This is changing some of the input values, so it delineated all of the areas in black as cores and then the final cores meeting the threshold size I set include those with white outlines. So, the input values enter do have a large impact and we ll have to think carefully about what we use. It s possible we ll have different input values for the different movement guilds to account at the very least for the fact that the species on our list have drastically different home range size requirements. 21
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This is using the cores resulting from the first run shown on slide 20 and then running the corridor modeling. The darkest corridors represent the areas of least resistance between cores. This is an example of the output showing how in many cases, there will be multiple options provided. Again, there are many different inputs you can provide for the corridor modeling, so we ll have to think carefully about those decisions. 23
There are also options to run further analyses once the corridors have been delineated that could be very helpful for us. 24
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Please let me know if you are interested on helping out on either/both the species and GIS sub-teams. 26
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