Connectivity of protected areas in Colombia: Identification and prioritization of potential corridors

Colombia is a megadiverse country that has suffered from high rates of deforestation threatening the ecosystems inside and outside protected areas. Consequently, the habitat for different forest species is becoming more fragmented, which may affect ecological processes such as pollination, gene flow, breeding, seed dispersal, among others. Therefore, it is crucial to improve the connectivity of habitat patches, which can be achieved by the identification and conservation of ecological corridors. In this study, we carried out a Least Cost path (LCP) analysis to identify potential ecological corridors between forested protected areas in Colombia. First, we identified a set of representative 16 threatened mammal species that were classified into four ecological profiles based on their preferred land cover type, altitudinal range, and their dispersal capacities. Then, we generated landscape resistance surfaces for each ecological profile and identified potential LCP corridors within and between protected areas that minimized resistance to dispersal of the species within each of these profiles. We prioritized the resulting potential corridors to identify those with higher priority for conservation by using the decrease in Probability of Connectivity index (dPC). Our findings suggest that the conservation of big forest patches inside protected areas tend to be more important than the conservation of corridors between them for species inhabiting lowland and sub-Andean forests, especially for habitat patches located in the Amazon region. However, for species inhabiting Andean and high Andean forests, our results suggest that restoration measures to increase forest cover between protected areas and therefore increase the permeability of the landscape matrix to species dispersal, will be key for their conservation. The results of our study can be used by different decision makers to identify priorities of conservation for in current protected areas and their surrounding forest habitats in Colombia. Furthermore, our ...