Amphibians at Risk: An analysis of wetland habitat and corridors needed to secure

Policy and guidelines that encourage removal of barriers through road mitigation to facilitate amphibian movement would greatly improve conservation efforts in The City of Calgary AMPHIBIANS AT RISK IN CALGARY 6 Given the multitude of land uses occurring in the urban environment, and the high expense associated with habitat and connectivity restorations, we ran centrality and barrier models to ass. [...] Most of the wetlands in Calgary occur outside the city center or in areas where urbanization is limited, with the majority of wetlands occurring along the eastern edge of the city (Figure 2). [...] AMPHIBIANS AT RISK IN CALGARY 11 2.2 Approach To inform the development of the habitat suitability index (HSI) model and to build resistance surfaces for the connectivity model for each amphibian species, we considered the results from Call of the Wetland Program occupancy models (unpublished data), reviewed the literature and sought expert opinion to identify and select key landscape attributes. [...] Keystone Wetlands and Corridors To understand the importance of core wetlands and corridors in the overall wetland network we used Linkage Mapper toolkit to run least cost path, centrality and barrier analysis using the amphibian sigmoidal resistance scenarios (represents non-extreme movement surface) and core wetlands as focal nodes. [...] 4.3 Keystone Wetlands and Corridors Keystone wetland and corridors were identified within the wetland network to better understand the role core wetlands and corridors play in sustaining the wetland network and to identify barriers in the network.