collapsing non-contiguous focal regions

[klaus...@gmail.com]

Hi there,

https://circuitscape.org/docs/ states that cells within each region are merged into a single node with all other cells in the region, including non-adjacent cells (i.e., regions need not be contiguous).

However, nothing is told about how this collapsing is done. Are non-contiguous focal regions collapsed into a node within the biggest area part? My impression is that results from Linkage Mapper and Circuitscape completely disregard the smaller parts of a non-contiguous focal region.

Background: I ran Circuitscape to model the commuting corridors of single bat roosts in the open landscape (village) to theit surrounding forest polygons. The forest polygons are considered as the foraging areas. To model a star-like current flow from a centre roost to the surrounding I tried the following setting: The roost in the centre was coded as focal region 1. The non-contiguous forest polygons in the surrounding were coded as focal region 2. The idea was to avoid calculating current between the forest polygons. If this setting disregards the smaller forest areas (as I assume) I better run Circuitscape for each pair of a forest polygon with the centre and sum the induvial outputs. Sor far, this option is not provided by the GUI of Circuitscape, isn’t it?

Thank you for your help ;-)

Best wishes,

Klaus