Integrating animal movement data into habitat connectivity planning

There is broad consensus that the long-term preservation of biodiversity requires well-connected habitats. Connectivity within and between habitats has intrinsic importance to animal populations, providing access to refuge, food, and social and reproductive partners, allowing for dispersal, migration, gene flow, and metapopulation dynamics, and supporting population resilience in the face of climate change and other anthropogenic stressors. Given accelerating habitat destruction and fragmentation, preserving and restoring connectivity is a goal of national and global biodiversity targets. Assessment of the physical relationships among habitat patches, or ‘structural connectivity’, based on remote sensing data, has become a common conservation approach. But these predictions may fail to capture the actual ability of organisms to move across landscapes or bodies of water, or ‘functional connectivity’. Here we present the work of Move BON’s (Animal Movement Biodiversity Observation Network) Connectivity Working Group, exploring how animal movement data, which represent observed rather than predicted movements, can be used to measure – and improve – the functional connectivity of habitats across ecological realms. Our contribution is a cross-taxonomic, multi-scale framework that links movement data to functional connectivity metrics and conservation applications, enabling consistent integration of animal movement into spatial planning. Several case studies, covering a range of contexts, are presented to illustrate how animal movement observations can be used to understand connectivity and drive real-world conservation impact. An extensive survey of the relevant literature also allows us to identify movement data deficiencies for estimating functional connectivity, highlighting targets for data collection to significantly advance spatial planning and policy development. Taken together, our work allows us to propose ideas for creating policy-relevant indicators that can be integrated into existing monitoring frameworks and used to assess progress towards achieving biodiversity targets. Given the rapid pace of habitat transformation and degradation, our ability to maintain and restore connectivity across gradients of human activity is critical to the success of biodiversity conservation – we must integrate movement-derived connectivity monitoring into planning for biodiversity conservation, or risk being blind to the ecological needs of animals.