Pandora
Plugin ID: 934
Model for landscape connectivity and ecosystem services assessment.
(17) votes
Download latest
PANDORA model assesses the Bio-Energy Landscape Connectivity (BELC) and related Ecosystem Services (ESs) for biodiversity conservation. The PANDORA philosophy considers the landscape as a unique system, responding to thermodynamic laws, in a state of continuous search for a metastable energy equilibrium as a consequence of changes in land use patterns and barrier to energy fluxes.
The model was developed to meet the needs of planners and practitioners involved in the environmental assessment procedure and it was proposed as an operative decision support system to assess the impact of different scenarios of land use change with particular attention to urbanization processes. This version of the model, PANDORA 3.0, analyses the contribution of each patch of land mosaic to global BELC and, consequently to the functionality and resilience of the entire system to which it belongs. Moreover, PANDORA 3.0 allows the selected patches to be evaluated in terms of ESs for biodiversity conservation considering both habitat type (as defined by information derived from Land use/land cover maps) and BELC.
