Land cover classification from Landsat satellite imagery is used to determine potential habitat . The Florida Gap Project is taking the modeling of potential habitat one step further by developing estimates of the minimum contiguous area of habitat required to mantain viable populations. For some species, smaller patches may still be considered viable habitat if the patch is within the dispersal distance of the species. Florida land-covers and habitat matrices are complete for all the areas south of Orlando allowing the Florida Gap Program to model potential habitat for south Florida. Above is the spatially modeled potential habitat for the 63 mammal that live in Florida.
Highest diversity is in the wet pine habitats in the upper central portion of the image.
To the right is the same 63 mammals modeled with consideration of minimum critical areas and dispersal distances for each species. There are two principal effects of incoorporating minimum critical area in species' models. The first is the removal of small patches of habitat. The second effect is a depression of the total species richness at specific locations. You may need to display the larger images to see these effects.