The Arizona Missing Linkages project aimed to design wildlife linkages which reconnect important blocks of habitat throughout Arizona. Based on a similar effort in California, our approach created individual corridor models for 5-15 focal species per study area. These corridors weree combined into a multi-species linkage design which—if conserved and integrated with underpasses or overpasses across potential barriers—will best maintain the ability of wildlife to move between protected wildlands even after the remaining land has been converted to uses incompatible with wildlife movement.

In 2005-2006, we created 8 linkage designs throughout Arizona. Because this was the first year of the project, I had many challenges to complete before I could begin analysis, including data acquisition, parameterizing species models, programming analysis tools, and developing a framework to rapidly conduct corridor analyses and create reports. Once a framework was in place, I had to create one 75-150 page report per month on average, so every aspect of the project—modeling, data management, cartography, and writing—had to be optimized for efficiency.

Workflow optimization

One of the most challenging aspects of this project was ensuring consistency in modeling procedures across all study areas. To enforce consistency, I wrote a suite of tools in Python (which eventually became CorridorDesigner) to perform multiple analyses including habitat suitability, patch configuration, and corridor analyses for a species simultaneously. This enabled me to batch process all analyses by supplying just a few key parameters. Instead of taking days to construct models by hand, I was able to consistently create them off-hours, allowing me to spend work time concentrating on other tasks.