How to Create Ecological Corridors for Landscape Connectivity in GIS (Linkscape Tutorial)

It's estimated that 56% of the Earth's natural areas are fragmented. Want to turn a fragmented landscape into a connected network of habitat? In this tutorial I walk through how to design ecological corridors in GIS step by step, from raw land cover data to a final corridor map you can share with partners and stakeholders, using the plugin Linkscape.

You’ll see how to:

Load and prepare land cover / habitat layers in Linkscape
Define “core habitat” vs “obstacles"
Run a corridor / least-cost path analysis to connect key patches
Visualize and export your corridor results for reports or fieldwork

This video is aimed at:
Conservation planners and ecologists
NGOs and restoration practitioners
Students learning landscape ecology or spatial planning
Anyone trying to connect wildlife habitat using open-source GIS

🧭 Tools used in this video:
Linkscape for corridor optimization by SORUS tools
-Download directly in QGIS
-Or from Github
https://github.com/sorus-tools/Linkscape

QGIS
https://qgis.org/download/


⏱️ Timestamps :
00:00 Intro
00:20 Raster version: Defining habitat and setting criteria
05:00 Raster version: Defining obstacle classes
10:20 Vector version: Defining habitat and setting criteria
11:43 Vector version: Defining obstacle class