A new study has found inadequacies in current approaches to identify potential movement routes for animals in a landscape between forests.
Providing fresh perspectives to the contemporary concept of connectivity, or corridors, between forests to save tigers and other wildlife, researchers now stress on broadening the people's understanding of 'connectivity' to address challenges of conservation effectively.
The latest joint research paper was prepared by researchers of the Wildlife Conservation Society - India Program, University of Florida, Wildlife Trust of India and Yale University.
The study suggests learning from the animals themselves to identify potential dispersal routes. It also suggests increasing our conservation toolkit to include appropriate new interventions, rather than limiting ourselves to just existing forested corridors.
According to the study, the new view will help develop innovative connectivity strategies as it advocates thinking beyond the typically-used thread-like 'wildlife corridors' for allowing animal movement. Methods have been developed for modelling animal dispersal through focus on identifying where animals move.
The research paper, titled 'From dispersal constraints to landscape connectivity: lessons from species distribution modelling', argues that the basis of these models should be data on animal movement or dispersal. Surprising as it may seem, this, in practice, is often neglected, it said.
"Animals do not exclusively seek and use corridors demarcated by humans to move across landscapes. In reality, we know that tigers, elephants and other animals use fields, plantations and other human-modified lands for movement in addition to corridors.
"What we need is to better understand what allows animals to move and what hinders them - conservation strategies that emerge from this understanding will be more effective and more sustaining," says Divya Vasudev, the lead author of the paper.
