What is UNICOR? (A species connectivity and corridor network simulator)
Among the most important and urgent problems for society and conservation ecology is keeping ecosystem integrality maintained through connectivity of healthy and viable populations.· To address this need, we introduce UNIversal CORridor Network Simulator (UNICOR), a species connectivity and corridor identification tool. UNICOR implements Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm for any number of landscapes and distributions of species. The model's features include a graphical user interface, parallel-processing, kernel path-buffering, connectivity maps, and various formatted outputs ready for graph and patch theory metrics.
Solving Problems with UNICOR:
UNICOR is intended for use by land managers as well as the research community and will be a valuable tool for the study of conservation biology, by increasing our understanding of species connectivity in fragmenting future landscapes. The results can be used to designate sites as potential source or sink populations, identify corridors, barriers, and population connectivity of keystone patches, and characterize zones for species persistence, vulnerability, and isolation.
Example Simulation:
- Shortest-path (LCP using Dijkstra's algorithm) between all individuals.
- Thresholded shortest-paths.
- Kernel resistance paths.
See the UNICOR example simulation for one possible use of UNICOR.
Disclaimer:
The software is in the public domain, and the recipient may not assert any proprietary rights thereto nor represent it to anyone as other than a University of Montana-produced program (version 1.x). UNICOR is provided "as is" without warranty of any kind, including, but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose. The user assumes all responsibility for the the accuracy and suitability of this program for a specific application. In no event will the authors or the University be liable for any damages, including lost profits, lost savings, or other incidental or consequential damages arising form the use of or the inability to use this program.
We strongly urge you to read the entire documentation before ever running UNICOR. We wish to remind users that we are not in the commercial software marketing business. We are scientists who recognized the need for a tool like UNICOR to assist us in our research on landscape genetic issues. Therefore, we do not wish to spend a great deal of time consulting on trivial matters concerning the use of UNICOR. However, we do recognize an obligation to provide some level of information support. Of course, we welcome and encourage your criticisms and suggestions about the program at all times. We will welcome questions about how to run UNICOR or interpret the output only after you have read the entire documentation. This is only fair and will eliminate many trivial questions. Finally, we are always interested in learning about how others have applied UNICOR in ecological investigation and management application. Therefore, we encourage you to contact us and describe your application after using UNICOR.
We hope that UNICOR is of great assistance in your work and we look forward to hearing about your applications.
Download:
UNICOR can be obtained from the downloads page
Small example run can be downloaded here
Medium example run can be downloaded here
Questions? A user manual can be downloaded here
Acknowledgements:
This program was developed by Erin Landguth, Brian Hand, and Joe Glassy.· GUI development was done by Mike Jacobi. Ross Carlson assisted with graphics, data sets, and website creation. The reference to cite is:
- Landguth EL, Hand BK, Glassy JM, Cushman SA (2011) UNICOR: A species connectivity and corridor network simulator. Ecography. DOI:10.1111/j.1600-0587.2011.07149.x.