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Ecological Intelligence / Subject

corridors

Peer-reviewed Europe

Rome's river was a corridor for some dispersers and a barrier for others

Evidence
Peer-reviewed
Geography
Rome metropolitan region, Italy
System
Urban protected areas / corridor modeling

WHAT THE EVIDENCE SAYS

Researchers modeled protected-area connectivity with circuit and graph theory under nine resistance scenarios representing three dispersal modes. The western and peripheral city sectors were generally more permeable than the center and east. The Tiber River appeared as either connective space or resistance depending on the assumed species' movement strategy. Shared candidate links often followed rivers and urban green spaces.

WHY IT MATTERS / OUR READ

Urban landscape plans should test which animals can actually cross a proposed corridor; a riverbank or park is not universally connected simply because it is green in an aerial image.

CAVEATS / UNCERTAINTY

Results are based on modeled resistance and dispersal assumptions, not observed migration or survival. Rome's urban form and species assemblages limit direct transfer of the identified corridor locations to other cities.

SOURCE

Landscape Ecology — Russo et al. (2026)
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Urban connectivity models suggest that no single green-link map represents all wildlife movement.

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Peer-reviewed Africa

African wild dogs can cross thousands of kilometres—but movement alone does not equal connectivity

Evidence
Peer-reviewed
Geography
Zambia, with regional relevance across eastern and southern Africa
System
African wild dog metapopulation and protected–unprotected landscape corridors

WHAT THE EVIDENCE SAYS

An Ecology report followed four recent African wild-dog dispersal events associated with Zambia’s major populations. The groups moved a combined 9,863 km, including a maximum path length of 4,126 km, and demonstrated that wild dogs can traverse protected areas, game-management areas and heavily human-used landscapes. But several dispersers died or disappeared in snaring-risk zones, groups often failed to immigrate into established packs, and the authors conclude that the extraordinary movements yielded little genetic or demographic connectivity.

WHY IT MATTERS / OUR READ

This separates landscape permeability from functional connectivity. A corridor can be physically traversable and still fail as conservation infrastructure if animals cannot survive the matrix, recruit into another population or reproduce. For large-carnivore planning, monitoring movement paths alone can therefore overstate success; survival, immigration and conflict risk belong in the connectivity metric.

CAVEATS / UNCERTAINTY

The paper reports a small number of exceptional dispersal events rather than a population-wide estimate of gene flow. Some mortality causes are inferred from collar and movement evidence, and the authors explicitly distinguish observed movement from demonstrated demographic or genetic connectivity.

SOURCE

Ecology
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GPS-tracked dispersers linked Zambia’s major wild-dog landscapes on paper, yet snares, failed immigration and conflict meant nearly 10,000 km of movement produced little demographic connectivity.

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