Process Description:
The Stepping Stones layer identifies terrestrial wildlife habitat small cores that intersect CHANJ Corridors. It was developed by first creating a raster base habitat layer statewide with values from 0 (non-habitat) to 1 (habitat). The components of the base layer were: A) LULC classes coded as Habitat (1), Marginal Habitat (0.5), and Non-Habitat (0), and B) Wetlands/Riparian Habitat (1) composed of the Landscape Project Riparian Corridor, Flood Prone areas, Hydric soils, and LULC Wetlands, with LULC Urban removed. The two layers were combined with the maximum value of the cell kept. Next, Railroads (0), and Roads (0) were added in, taking the minimum cell value. Core Mapper (in the Gnarly Landscape Utilities ArcGIS toolbox (http://www.circuitscape.org/gnarly-landscape-utilities) was used to model core areas. The inputs for the modeling included: 1) the base habitat layer, 2) a moving window radius of 100m, which represents the 75th percentile of average home range sizes of the small, low mobility target CHANJ species, 3) a minimum average habitat value of 0.88, which was informed by analyses of species location data and their average habitat values, 4) county roads, highways, and interstates as core barriers, and 5) a minimum core threshold size of 12.56 ha, which represents the 75th percentile of average home range sizes of the small, low mobility CHANJ species. Further refinement included removing core areas that did not meet the minimum threshold size after subtracting out area of Marginal Habitat and open water or that were >78.5ha. Only core areas that intersected with CHANJ Corridors and that did not have their centroid in CHANJ Cores were retained in the final Stepping Stones layer. The resultant Stepping Stones were converted to polygons for the final product.