Mapping wildlife connectivity across Nova Scotia

This past spring, ApexRMS completed a province-wide, multispecies ecological connectivity assessment for the Nova Scotia Department of Natural Resources (NS DNR). Spanning more than 5.5 million hectares, the project set out to understand how wildlife moves through a landscape shaped by agriculture, urban development, and an expanding road network to give the province a science-based foundation for planning connectivity interventions. This project also marks the first time we have extended our connectivity modeling beyond mapping movement to the practical application of identifying potential wildlife crossings.

Building the foundation

The assessment focused on five mammals chosen to capture a range of habitat needs and movement behaviours, including American black bear, moose, snowshoe hare, white-tailed deer, and American marten. ApexRMS team members, Alessandro Filazzola and Skye Pearman-Gillman, assembled a refined province-wide land use and land cover map and built habitat suitability models for each species. These land use and land cover layers informed the resistance surfaces used in the connectivity analysis, translating what we know about where each species can live into estimates of how easily it can move.

Modeling movement and identifying crossings

Using the omniscape package for SyncroSim, connectivity was then modeled for each species using a circuit-theory approach that simulates omnidirectional movement across the landscape. Combining these species-specific results revealed broad movement patterns across the province, along with the places where roads most strongly disrupt them. By pairing connectivity outputs with wildlife-vehicle collision data, the analysis identified and ranked candidate locations where wildlife crossings could deliver the greatest ecological benefit, weighing factors such as barrier severity, collision history, and on-the-ground feasibility.

Building lasting capacity

To turn this analysis into a lasting resource, ApexRMS led a two-day workshop with the DNR team in Nova Scotia:

• The first day reviewed the connectivity methods and results and used facilitated discussions to examine potential crossing locations.
• The second day introduced SyncroSim and the omniscape package, giving participants hands-on experience running and refining the analysis themselves.

The goal was to build lasting capacity within DNR, turning a one-time study into a tool that the province can use to update analyses as new data and management questions emerge.

We are grateful to the Nova Scotia Department of Natural Resources team and to all the workshop participants whose knowledge and feedback shaped this work. We look forward to seeing how it supports conservation planning across the province.