Hi Jesse,

I am a PhD student in geography here at UC Davis and part of the statewide connectivity working group that you have been contacting in regards to connectivity/corridor data for your statewide compilation project. I apologize if it is too late to contribute to this effort, but I have a few GIS files that you might be interested in including. Unfortunately I haven't had time to draft metadata files for them, but I will give you a little methodology description. Hopefully this suffices.

Grizzly_Liberty_elk_corridor: This corridor is a potential connectivity point for tule elk dispersal between Grizzly Island and Liberty Island in Solano County. It is an identified least cost path buffered by 500 meters. The cost surface used to create this path was a function of current land cover (rated for the elk using CWHR land cover values) and existing land management (i.e. is a polygon part of a public or private conservation area).

SJV_COA: These are "core" potential conservation opportunity areas (COA) identified for the 8 county San Joaquin Valley region. While these are not corridors by any means, they are used for the end points for the corridors we did identify in this region (see below). These COA were selected by overlaying 14 important ecological features of the region as identified by a panel of representatives from a number of state and federal agencies and private conservation organizations. We selected areas where the overlap (including with existing conservation areas) was greatest, resulting in these 24 COA.

SJV_corridors: These potential corridors were identified using a tool called Corridor Creator that is a modified version of the least cost corridor ArcMap tool. This tool identifies a connectivity surface rather than single line - we then selected the highest rated raster cells from the resulting surfaces and converted them to polygons. For this analysis we used a more complex model to create our cost surface. We included, in addition to current land cover and management, road density, urban area density, natural area density, and waterway density. We created cost surfaces for three broad suites of species - forest, open/shrub, and aquatic/riparian. These 3 surfaces were then summed to create one overall, generic cost surface for the region.

These are currently unpublished data. The two SJV datasets are included in a draft paper that we are currently in the process of trying to get published and will be part of my dissertation work. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to drop me an email. Good luck with your project.

 
Patrick Huber

 
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Patrick Huber

Ph.D. candidate

Geography Graduate Group

UC Davis

prhuber@ucdavis.edu

530-754-6621
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