Enhancing Habitat Connectivity through Cost-Effective Ecological Corridor Design Using Optimization

The rapid exploitation of natural resources in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique, has expanded human settlements and fragmented ecosystems, threatening wide-ranging species like African elephants that depend on connected habitats. While viable elephant populations remain in Niassa Special Reserve and Quirimbas National Park, their movement through unprotected areas leads to human-elephant conflicts. Establishing cost-effective ecological corridors is essential for habitat connectivity. This study models the landscape as a grid of habitat patches, weighted by land-use resistance, and compares two corridor design strategies: graph-based shortest-path algorithms (A* and Dijkstra) and an integer linear programming model. Computational tests on grids ranging from 10 × 10 to 10 × 40 patches show that A* and Dijkstra generate high-quality corridors efficiently, while the linear programming model fails to converge for grids larger than 20 × 20 within 60 minutes. The results demonstrate the computational advantage of shortest-path algorithms for large-scale corridor planning in Mozambique.