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8021876 
Journal Article 
Evaluating Forest Landscape Connectivity through Conefor Sensinode 2.2 
Saura, S 
2008 
403-422 
WOS:000261350700022 
Maintaining and restoring landscape connectivity is currently a central concern in ecology and biodiversity conservation, but there is yet a lack of solid, operational and user-driven tools available for integrating connectivity in forest landscape planning. Here we describe the new Conefor Sensinode 2.2 (CS22) software, which quantifies the importance of forest habitat patches for maintaining or improving landscape connectivity and is conceived as a tool for decision-making support in landscape planning and habitat conservation. CS22 is based on (1) graph structures, which have been suggested to posses the greatest benefit to effort ratio for some conservation problems regarding landscape connectivity, (2) the habitat availability concept, which considers a patch itself as a space where connectivity occurs, integrating intrapatch and interpatch connectivity in a single measure and (3) the new probability of connectivity index, which has been recently shown to present improved properties compared to other existing indices and can be partitioned in four fractions considering the different ways in which a certain forest patch can affect the habitat, availability and connectivity of the landscape. We provide an example of application to a case study for the Tengmalm's Owl (Aegolius funereus) in the region of Catalonia (NE Spain) to illustrate the results provided by the software and their potential for integrating connectivity in forest landscape planning. The CS22 software and all the geospatial data used in this case study can be downloaded from the World Wide Web, which allows performing the entire analysis as an exercise with real-world data.