Least-Cost Modelling and Landscape Ecology: Concepts, Applications, and Opportunities

Abstract

The concept of nearness and that nearer things are more connected is useful in quantifying a variety of geographical patterns and processes, including ecological connectivity between geographic locations. In some ecological systems connectivity does not follow nearness relations defined by Euclidean distances, so distance must be measured another way. Least-cost modelling is a technique that can incorporate traversal costs across a landscape to measure the least-cost distance between locations as a function of both the distance travelled and the costs traversed. There has been a significant increase in the interest and use of least-cost modelling by ecologists in the last decade. However, perhaps because early applications of least-cost modelling in ecology tended to cite the method with reference to geographic information system software rather than the geographical science literature, ecologists are not currently making full use of available least-cost modelling techniques that have continued to develop. This review aims to describe the concepts of least-cost modelling, demonstrate current applications of least-cost modelling in landscape ecology, and to suggest future opportunities by linking the ecological application of least-cost modelling with recent geographical science developments from which least-cost modelling originally developed.