RESEARCH ARTICLE A comparison of metrics predicting landscape connectivity for a highly interactive species along an urban gradient in Colorado, USA Seth B. Magle Æ David M. Theobald Æ Kevin R. Crooks Received: 6 August 2007 / Accepted: 31 October 2008 / Published online: 15 November 2008 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008 Abstract Many organisms persist in fragmented habitat where movement between patches is essential for long-term demographic and genetic stability. In the absence of direct observation of movement, connectivity or isolation metrics are useful to char- acterize potential patch-level connectivity. However, multiple metrics exist at varying levels of complexity, and empirical data on species distribution are rarely used to compare performance of metrics. We com- pared 12 connectivity metrics of varying degrees of complexity to determine which metric best predicts the distribution of prairie dog colonies along an urban gradient of 385 isolated habitat patches in Denver, Colorado, USA. We found that a modified version of the incidence function model including area-weight- ing of patches and a cost-weighted distance surface best predicted occupancy, where we assumed roads were fairly impermeable to movement, and low-lying drainages provided dispersal corridors. We also found this result to be robust to a range of cost weight parameters. Our results suggest that metrics should incorporate both patch area and the composition of the surrounding matrix. These results provide guid- ance for improved landscape habitat modeling in fragmented landscapes and can help identify target habitat for conservation and management of prairie dogs in urban systems. Keywords Connectivity  Landscape metrics  Prairie dog  Urban ecology  Habitat  Fragmentation Introduction Habitat fragmentation is a worldwide phenomenon that threatens many species (Wilcox and Murphy 1985; Wilcove et al. 1998). When habitat becomes discontinuous, movement of organisms among resource patches is essential to maintain demographic and genetic stability of populations (Hanski 1994; Hanski and Gaggiotti 2004), and the degree to which a patch is isolated is frequently a key determinant of species abundance and distribution (Crooks 2002; Crooks et al. 2004; Crooks and Sanjayan 2006). Numerous metrics exist to quantify patch isolation or S. B. Magle (&)  K. R. Crooks Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523-1474, USA e-mail: sbmagle@wisc.edu Present Address: S. B. Magle 70 Science Hall, Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706, USA D. M. Theobald Department of Human Dimensions of Natural Resources and the Natural Resource Ecology Lab, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523-1480, USA 123 Landscape Ecol (2009) 24:267–280 DOI 10.1007/s10980-008-9304-x