Habitat connectivity — how well a fragmented landscape lets species move between
patches of suitable habitat — is a central input to conservation planning and
environmental impact assessment. The established tool in the field, Conefor,
computes the Probability of Connectivity (PC) index and its per-patch
decomposition (dPC), but its core algorithm becomes intractable above about
1 000 habitat patches: a single such analysis can take a week of computing time,
and larger landscapes cannot be analysed at all.
ekokrati.graph computes the same connectivity metrics with modern sparse-graph
algorithms whose results are mathematically exact — validated against Conefor —
and which extend exact analysis to around 10 000 patches. Beyond that, a
hierarchical spatial-decomposition method targets national scale (up to ~250 000
patches) with quantified, ecologically validated bounds on the approximation
error — a capability no existing tool provides.
This allocation funds a first phase on Dardel's CPU nodes, where the software
runs unmodified: validating the method at scale, producing the first measured
compute-cost figures, and running one representative Swedish landscape through
the full pipeline. The result is open scientific software and a peer-reviewable
methodology that lets ecologists, agencies, and EIA practitioners analyse
connectivity at the scale at which conservation decisions are actually made. The
measured results from this phase will justify a later, larger allocation for the
full national programme.