Florida Snakes

A look into the Indigo snake populations in Florida and how the landscape features contribute to its growing or falling numbers.

“One of the key concepts in conservation biology is landscape connectivity. In other words, how easy is it for animals to move between discrete habitat patches and what are the features that either impede or facilitate movement? Connectivity is often thought about in terms of linking protected areas in an increasingly human-dominated landscape, but the same processes also play out in natural landscapes. For example, a certain habitat type may expose an animal to greater predation risk, decreasing the connectivity between the habitat patches that it separates. Ultimately, connectivity can impact a wide variety of processes that occur over both short and long time periods. Frequent movements of an animal within it’s home range may have different ecological consequences than rare dispersal movements made by only a few individuals within a population.”

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