Estimating landscape integrity: scale, trans-boundary, and validation issues

Building on a recently established approach to estimate landscape integrity for the conterminous US, we will discuss three critical issues when thinking about expanding for broader and more diverse types of settings: scale, trans-boundary, and validation issues. We will present our results from a comparison of continental to regional scale models of the degree of human modification for western US and Canada, and our modeling approach to estimate landscape integrity. We also will discuss our expert-based approach to generate validation data, piloted for the Western Governors Association Crucial Habitat Assessment Tool.