Nova Scotia Connectivity

The Nova Scotia Protected Areas System covers 13% of the province's land area, providing habitats for species at risk. However, relatively little is known about how animals use those protected areas and how well they can move between them. The Government of Nova Scotia sought a comprehensive assessment of landscape connectivity using new connectivity metrics. We needed to develop new scripts, primarily in R, which would process vector and raster maps of protected areas and deliver clear, useful metrics that could be easily put into practice.