Habitat Loss and Fragmentation
Linear and other infrastructure development: Roads, railways, pipelines, and dams fragment habitats and create physical barriers that restrict wildlife movement, gene flow, and access to critical resources.
Unsustainable land use: Practices such as deforestation, overgrazing, and resource extraction such as mining, can break up or completely eliminate continuous natural habitats resulting in smaller isolated patches, isolating populations and impacting natural ecological functioning and processes.
Agricultural intensification: Large-scale monocultures, increased fencing, and heavy chemical use, also degrade and break up continuous habitats, remove natural features and pollute ecosystems, affecting species movement between habitats in search of more suitable habitats.
Urban expansion: The spread of cities and settlements replaces natural ecosystems with impermeable structures, creating hard barriers that sever links between remaining habitat patches.
Climate Change
Shifting temperatures and precipitation patterns force species to move to suitable conditions, but fragmented landscapes limit their ability to migrate or adapt. Increased fire frequency alters habitat composition and continuity, potentially removing stepping-stone habitats needed for species dispersal.
Invasive Alien Species
Non-native plants and animals can alter habitat structure, outcompete native species, and disrupt ecological processes along corridors, reducing their effectiveness for movement.
Pollution
Air, water, noise, and light pollution degrade habitat quality along movement pathways, making corridors unsafe or unusable for many species further isolating populations.
Inadequate Integrated Spatial Planning and Collaboration
Lack of coordinated and cross-sector planning results in a failure to account for the importance of ecological networks and ensuring connected land- and sea-scapes in spatial plans, leading to disconnected conservation efforts, competing and conflicting interests and ultimately cumulative fragmentation across nature.