Conefor Sensinode 2.2: A software package for quantifying the importance of habitat patches for landscape connectivity

Maintaining and restoring landscape connectivity is currently a central concern in ecology and biodiversity conservation, and there is an increasing demand of user-driven tools for integrating connectivity in landscape planning. Here we describe the new Conefor Sensinode 2.2 (CS22) software, which quantifies the importance of habitat patches for maintaining or improving functional landscape connectivity and is conceived as a tool for decision-making support in landscape planning and habitat conservation. CS22 is based on graph structures, which have been suggested to possess the greatest benefit to effort ratio for conservation problems regarding landscape connectivity. CS22 includes new connectivity metrics based on the habitat availability concept, which considers a patch itself as a space where connectivity occurs, integrating in a single measure the connected habitat area existing within the patches with the area made available by the connections between different habitat patches. These new metrics have been shown to present improved properties compared to other existing metrics and are particularly suited to the identification of critical landscape elements for connectivity. CS22 is distributed together with GIS extensions that allow for directly generating the required input files from a GIS layer. CS22 and related documentation can be freely downloaded from the World Wide Web. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.