Week 9: Corridor Analysis

Corridor model

This week's assignment involved creating cost paths and corridors.  Ultimately, a model for black bear movement between two national park units was created.  Cost paths and corridors are used to predict the pathways that are least costly to construct (in the case of roads and utilities, etc.) or traverse (in the case of wildlife, utilities, etc).

The corridor output at right shows a predicted black bear corridor.  The parameters used to create this corridor were elevation, land use (not shown), and roads (not shown).  Bears prefer certain elevations, certain habitats, and avoid roads.  So a suitability analysis was performed to find the most bear-friendly areas.  Then the corridor analysis was use to create the best path between the two units.