Movement-Derived Connectivity Metrics as indicators for ecosystem monitoring

The persistence of wildlife populations depends on the extent, quality, and spatial configuration of suitable habitat. Yet as landscapes become increasingly fragmented, the ability of species to move, disperse, and maintain viable populations is being severely compromised. While structural connectivity—based on land cover or habitat adjacency—is widely measured, functional connectivity, the degree to which landscapes actually facilitate animal movement and gene flow, remains poorly quantified at broad scales. Because animal movement directly reflects how individuals interact with the landscape, it provides a powerful but underutilized basis for ecosystem monitoring through population persistence. We developed a movement-based metric that quantifies connectivity as the number of unique grid cells visited by an individual within a time period (e.g., month, season, year). This metric reflects how animals link habitat patches through their movements and space use and provides a standardized, scalable indicator that can be compared across populations, species, and regions. We compiled a telemetry dataset from around ten thousand individuals across 70 terrestrial mammal species, spanning diverse movement strategies, ecological contexts, and life-history traits. We assessed how anthropogenic effects modify functional connectivity across multiple spatial and temporal scales. We found that functional connectivity declined as the human footprint increased. In addition, functional connectivity declined substantially between areas with higher and lower road densities. These losses varied markedly across species, reflecting variation in movement ecology, habitat specialization, and behavioral responses to disturbance. These differences offer key insights into which taxa are most vulnerable to fragmentation and where management interventions may be most effective. Our results demonstrate that animal movement data can be transformed into a policy-relevant, operational indicator of functional connectivity suitable for biodiversity monitoring frameworks. Our results reveal a pervasive, human-driven erosion of ecological connectivity, underscoring the urgency of targeted restoration and management to sustain the functional integrity and ecological processes of wildlife movement worldwide.