Assessment and Comparison of Landscape Connectivity in KoozehTopraghi Watershed, Ardabil Province

Following the unbalanced development and overexploitation of the country's watersheds, land fragmentation has become a major concern for the conservation of ecosystem services and land health. For this purpose, the present study was planned to evaluate and compare the landscape connectivity indices of KoozehTopraghi Watershed as one of the ecologically susceptible watersheds located in Ardabil Province. To this end, the landscape connectivity was investigated according to both structural and functional viewpoints, based on the green patches (rangelands and orchard) distributed at 36 sub-watershed areas. The mentioned indices were first calculated using the Fragstats Software and graph theory at each sub-watershed; then, they were standardized according to interval standardization between zero and one in order to consider the scale effect and draw a comparison in the same variation range. Therefore, the landscape connectivity was calculated, classified and mapped for each studied  sub-watershed and the whole watershed. Structural connectivity results showed the high level of landscape connectivity between green patches in all studied sub-watersheds. In addition, the results showed that the landscape connectivity was obtained with the mean and standard deviation of 0.50 ± 0.52, being varied from 0.50 to 0.97. The results also proved that out of the 36 sub-watersheds located in the KoozehTopraghi, only 15 sub-watersheds had natural lands (orchard and rangelands). Also, the sub-watershed 27, with the highest value of landscape connectivity (0.97), had the highest priority.