Identification et caractérisation de la trame verte et bleue du PNR des Ardennes : comparaison des approches par habitat et par perméabilité des milieux

Abstract

The identification and characterization of ecological networks appear to be an important issue for the territory managers, as part of the constitution of green and blue infrastructures. These are a major tool to mitigate landscape fragmentation processes, which affect the circulation and life cycle of both animal and plant species. However, there is no one, single method to determine ecological networks as these are identified using several methods that are rarely compare with each other. The purpose of this article is to compare two approaches of identification and characterization of an ecological network, commonly used in the study of the Regional Natural Park of the Ardennes. The first approach, called "habitat", can be described as structural. It relies on the analysis of land-use data through visual interpretation, based on an evaluation and notation of all the landscape features depending on their ecological qualities. The second, known as environmental permeability or species dispersion, is functional since it simulates the potential displacements of indicator species from the biodiversity reservoirs. The aim is to show that the two approaches can be complementary when it comes to identification of the ecological network of a territory, and to compensate for the different biases that they can present individually. The adoption of these two approaches offers the possibility of having tools adjusted to the management goals (search for corridors for a given species, precise diagnosis of an area), but also proposes documents that are comprehensible to the stakeholders.

Keywords

• GIS
• spatial analysis
• habitat
• biodiversity
• fragmentation
• ecological network