How to design ecological connectivity in urban areas?

Abstract

Natural areas contribute to improve the quality of life in urban areas. In 2014, the city of Strasbourg (North Eastern, France) initiated a project to characterize connectivity between all the remaining natural areas. Graph networks have been used to design a framework to be applied by landuse planners. The connectivity of the landscape was determined on the basis of the definition of the optimal habitat of the Red Squirrel (Sciurus vulgaris), its travel preferences and its mobility in the city. The objective of this article is to present our original approach to identify the most favourable links, to evaluate the importance of certain habitat patches and to describe a potential connectivity at the scale of the city of Strasbourg. We demonstrated that this ecological framework can be an effective diagnostic tool to understand the issues of connectivity and a foresight tool to guide long-term planning policies.