Ecological Connectivity & Species
Connectivity allows animal to move freely across different ecosystems to find food, water, mates, and new territories and facilitates dispersal enabling gene flow between populations. Migratory species, in particular, need connected nature to thrive. They require different habitats throughout their lifecycles to access resources essential for their reproduction and survival. They move hundreds or thousands of kilometres during their lifetime, across habitats, countries and national borders, making their conservation status and behaviour good indicators of ecosystem health.
Ecological Connectivity & Climate Change
As we continue to face the ever-increasing climate change crisis, connectivity is becoming even more important to allow many species to adapt and move away from places where conditions are becoming less favourable. Connected nature ensures ecosystems and as a consequence, biodiversity and humans, become more resilient to climate change by providing a stable environment for important ecosystem processes and services, especially when occurring across temperature gradients. Connected ecosystems can also enhance climate mitigation by acting as carbon sinks and preventing green house gas emissions arising from human activities that contribute to ecosystem degradation and fragmentation, for example from deforestation.
Ecological Connectivity & Human Well-being
Well-connected ecosystems also support a diversity of ecological functions and services that benefit humans. For example:
Food Security Fragmented ecosystems can impede pollinator movement, seed dispersal and soil fertility impacting agricultural production. Well-connected landscapes enhance soil health and crop resilience thereby increasing overall food security.
Water security Ensuring hydrological connectivity- for example through connected wetlands -can protect against droughts by sustaining water availability and enhancing groundwater recharge and can help reduce the intensity and duration of floods downstream by storing floodwater. Well-connected hydrological systems also contribute to ecosystem integrity and stability.
Human Health Spillover, as a result of increased interactions between human-domestic-wildlife is a primary pathway for emerging infectious diseases. Fragmented ecosystems directly increase the risk of this spillover by forcing wildlife to come into contact with people, their farms or livestock. Well-connected landscapes can reduce these potential conflicts and prevent the new ecosystems being established as a result of fragmentation, which can affect disease evolution, behaviour and distribution.
Resilience Fragmented ecosystems are considerably more vulnerable to environmental stressors such as drought, climate change, invasive species and land use change as a result of increasing human and infrastructure development. Connected nature, enables species, ecosystems and communities to become more resilient to these rapid environmental changes by allowing species to respond to range shifts and by providing a more stable environment for important ecosystem processes and services.
Ecological Connectivity & Protected Areas
Although protected areas are considered the cornerstone of biodiversity conservation, many remain isolated and are not connected as part of wider ecological networks. Well-connected protected area systems of protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures are particularly important to mitigate biodiversity loss as they facilitate species movement and migration connecting populations, and maintaining ecosystem functioning
Ecological Connectivity & Cooperation
Ecological connectivity serves as a powerful tool in leveraging transboundary and cross-sectoral cooperation since it requires the collaboration of multiple stakeholders and sectors to address threats to its persistence effectively. Furthermore, ecosystem processes, and species movements and migration patterns often transcend national boundaries and therefore maintaining connectivity across critical ecosystems requires a unified and collaborative governance and management approaches.