As polygons of habitat change size, shape, and adjacency, habitat quality will also change. There are opportunities at several stages of the biodiversity analysis for landscape factors to be assessed. I define areas of potential restoration as areas capable of increased biodiversity value with feasible levels of management change. In many cases, urban areas have low biodiversity value, and it is often not practical to improve these areas. Farmlands may also have low value, however landuse practices can often be modified to improve habitat, without financial impact to the farmer.
Examples are larger hedge-rows between fields.
The five ecologic sub-models present a synopsis of biodiversity values for county lands. These models differ in their assumptions on the nature of urban growth and will accordingly differ in their predictions over various time periods. The overall effect of these differences on biodiversity analysis is unknown, and is part of my work in progress. The Clarke urban growth model, as modified for this analysis, requires several types of data to be resampled and formatted as raster images for input. By performing a query of each landuse polygon impacted by projected urbanization, I obtain a list of species impacted.