Conservation

Instructions. Click on a point in the tradeoff chart below to display the mapped route to the left and values below. Map is zoomable/pannable and begin/end points changable.

Study Area:

Species:

Begin:

point begin code

End:

point end code

Industry Profile:

Eventually these industry profiles will enable customized species responses depending on types of impact.

selected transform

Background. Welcome to Conservation Routing! Least cost routes are calculated based on different cost surfaces. The initial cost surface applies a constant value for all cells resulting in a Euclidean path with the minimum distance. This path would be the least costly to industry, making it the reference point (min(dist)) to which other routes are compared. Other paths are calculated by applying transformations to the conservation risk surface, which is calculated as the cumulative species score weighted by extinction risk. The summation of conservation risk values traversed by the path determines the conservation score. The reference point (min(cost)) is subtracted from all values.

Tradeoff selected:

Conservation Risk. The conservation risk surface is a cumulative species hotspot map that provides the cost against which the least-cost path is routed. This surface is constructed from the individual species distribution maps which are weighted by the species' extinction risk before each pixel is summed. Finally the resistance surface is divided by the maximum value to normalize it to a maximum of 1.

More formally, each pixel ($i$) across $n$ species ($s$) is summed by its relative density ($z_i$), which is based on the pixel values' ($x_i$) deviation ($\sigma_s$) from mean density ($\mu_s$), and multiplying by the species' extinction risk weight ($w_s$): $$ z_{i,s} = \frac{ x_{i,s} - \mu_s }{ \sigma_s } \\ Z_i = \frac{ \sum_{s=1}^{n} z_{i,s} * w_s }{ n } $$