Enhancing Landscape Connectivity on an Urban Scale A study on identifying the optimal green corridor

The increasing number of people moving towards cities pressures the housing market and forces cities to expand, threatening green areas and the overall landscape connectivity. Green areas such as green corridors contain a significant amount of flora and establish connections between habitats which are beneficial to conserve biodiversity. As cities expanded, green corridors and other green areas have disappeared, severing the connections and fragmenting the landscape. Habitat fragmentation is considered to be one of the major threats to biodiversity and its effects have to be mitigated. This research uses GIS for finding the optimal green corridors in the urban area to connect the patches of high value for improvement and conservation of biodiversity. These green corridors have been found by creating an impedance map based on values from previous studies, and a map that indicates the intensity of infrastructure in the area. These maps are combined using the entropy weight method after which a least-cost algorithm finds the potential paths to connect the patches. The potential paths are then prioritized based on the gravity model and the number of residents it can also affect within its range to ensure both man and nature can profit from the green corridor. The results show that the model utilizes the existing green corridors in the study area but also finds new pathways which are in line with the local municipality’s vision of developing green corridors.