ST-Connect SyncroSim Package

Connectivity planning for future climate and land-use change

ST-Connect is an open-source SyncroSim Base Package for forecasting landscape connectivity.

ST-Connect uses a pipeline approach to chain together spatially-explicit models of landscape change and habitat connectivity. A simple ST-Connect model pipeline consists of two stages: a state-and-transition simulation model of landscape change (ST-Sim) and a circuit model of landscape connectivity (Circuitscape). ST-Sim projects changes in both vegetation and land use, with uncertainty, while Circuitscape infers the connectivity consequences of these changes.

ST-Connect has been used to support connectivity conservation planning in Quebec, Canada by creating forecasts of ecological connectivity for forest-dependent wildlife under a range of land use and climate scenarios (Rayfield, Larocque, Martins et al., 2021). ST-Connect is a package that plugs into the SyncroSim modeling framework. It can also be run from the R programming language using the rsyncrosim R package and from the Python programming language using the pysyncrosim Python package.

Requirements

This package requires the following software:
The latest stable release of SyncroSim.
R version 4.0.4 or higher.
Circuitscape 5.
Zonation version 4.0.0 (optional).

How to Install

For installation instructions, see the Install ST-Connect section on the Getting Started page.

Getting Started

For more information on ST-Connect, including a Quickstart Tutorial, see the Getting Started page.

Links

Browse source code at http://github.com/ApexRMS/stconnect/
Report a bug at http://github.com/ApexRMS/stconnect/issues

Developers

Bronwyn Rayfield (Author, maintainer)
Alex Embrey (Author)
Colin Daniel (Author)
Valentin Lucet (Author)
Andrew Gonzalez (Author)
Kyle Martins (Author)