Landscape Blocks - NSNF, CDFW [ds1004]

The 246 landscape blocks are habitat areas, based on protected lands, in the northern Sierra Nevada foothills and neighboring ecoregions. Least-cost corridors for nine focal species, riparian connections, and land facets were modeled between the 271 landscape blocks for the northern Sierra Nevada foothills wildlife connectivity project.

The northern Sierra Nevada foothills (NSNF) wildlife connectivity project modeled connectivity by identifying corridors for potential wildlife movement between habitat areas called landscape blocks. Our landscape blocks, which may be any shape, were identified in June 2013 based on protected lands including: 1) lands managed primarily for biodiversity conservation (based on USGS GAP Analysis conservation status designations GAP 1 and 2); 2) mixed use public lands (USGS GAP 3) that intersect with Large Intact Blocks identified by the California Essential Habitat Connectivity project (i.e., areas of high ecological integrity that are >10,000 acres in size); and, 3) lands under conservation easement. Landscape blocks included all land parcels 100 acres or larger that met our conservation status criteria. A one kilometer buffer was added to all land parcels to form blocks of land. We split our landscape blocks by major rivers and roads to identify barriers within blocks. For more information see the project report at [https://nrm.dfg.ca.gov/FileHandler.ashx?DocumentID=85358].

Northern Sierra Nevada foothills wildlife connectivity team, California Protected Areas Database (CPAD - www.calands.org), National Conservation Easement Database (NCED - http://www.conservationeasement.us/) , California Essential Habitat Connectivity Project (CDFW BIOS ds621).

The user accepts sole responsibility for the correct interpretation of this report and the correct use of its accompanying data sets in environmental documents. The northern Sierra Nevada foothills wildlife connectivity project linkage data delineates lands likely important to the 30 focal species movement between large, mostly protected areas across the study area. It is a decision-support tool to be refined by field work and local linkage designs. DO NOT assume that lands outside Landscape Blocks or Least-Cost Corridors or Linkages are unimportant to wildlife populations or movements