Creating a Wildness Index to Identify and Map Wildlife Corridors in WA

The purpose of project 4 was to identify optimal wildlife corridors in Washington. In order to do this, I used datasets of protected areas, DEM, land cover, highways, and human population to create a "wildness index" which measures the suitability of land for animals. Ruggedness was calculated as variation in elevation, distance accumulation was used to calculate highway proximity, and people per square kilometer of land was calculated. Next, all of these datasets were normalized so they could be combined into a single dataset. Then, the wildness index was used to create a cost surface, which, along with straight-line distance, measures the difficulty of animals to travel between protected areas. As all of the data used was raster data, this project required a high amount data processing, making it even more time-consuming.