Continuity and Connectivity

To cope with increasing habitat fragmentation, biodiversity conservation in the Carpathians needs to go beyond the establishment of protected areas. There is the need to interconnect protected areas and to establish ecological corridors that facilitate migration and genetic exchange between wildlife populations. This helps species to adapt to environmental transformations and to secure their long term survival.

BioREGIO Carpathians wants to find out more about the main natural, legal, social and economic barriers that have an influence on the connectivity of natural areas in the Carpathians. We will collect existing GIS data at both, a Carpathian-wide and a Pilot-site scale and analyze them in order to identify existing barriers.
With Web-GIS-Visualization we would like to make primary ecological corridors tangible and visible. On the basis of GIS-technologies we will elaborate a tool for metadata, and data storage and visualization of the regional and Carpathian wide data collected that will be linked to the Carpathian Joint Biodiversity Information System (CJBIS).

The elaboration of recommendations for restoring and sustaining primary ecological corridors should be a primary input for the implementation of Article9 of the Carpathian Convention’s Biodiversity Protocol (Continuity and connectivity of natural and semi-natural habitats, ecological network in the Carpathians).

Our activities related to connectivity and continuity take place in the frame of WP5.