How do urban landscapes influence animal dispersal and ecological connectivity?

To halt biodiversity loss by restoring and connecting currently isolated habitat patches. GALLANT will improve biodiversity by restoring and connecting habitats across Glasgow.

Citizens will play a key role in helping researchers to map important bird and mammal species that lead to new management practices in greenspaces to increase connectivity between habitats.

On this project, Jessica is using ecological and population genetics to examine how ecological connectivity functions within fragmented animal populations.

This project applies high-density, genome-wide approaches to measure and evaluate genetic patterns with great sensitivity.

Individual movement events among patches will be quantified by assigning dispersers back to their natal patch using genome-wide inference. Permeability of landscape features and habitat types to gene flow will be assessed using landscape genetics approaches.

Candidate map layers of landscape resistance and conductors to movement will be statistically assessed regarding their ability to explain observed spatial genetic patterns at the individual and population level.