Abstract
Urban and suburban spaces represent specific challenges in terms of spatial planning, particularly when it comes to biodiversity maintenance policies like the Green and Blue Belt and the “Nature in the City” plan. In these spaces, where soil artificialisation is taken to the extreme, the notion of connectivity takes on its full meaning. The corridors there indeed allow for exchanges within them, allowing biodiversity to maintain itself, and between less artificialised regions distributed around these zones and for which exchanges would be impossible or extremely limited without these corridors. The challenge which we propose to take up is to invent and test techniques for the definition and validation of the functionality of these corridors which will be efficient in terms of biological relevance and costs. Our project’s main objective is to provide everyone involved in spatial planning, and particularly local authorities, with decision-making tools on the efficiency, relevance and development of corridors from landscape analyses. These corridor functionality models will be tested through direct monitoring and an original landscape genetics approach on various target species. The territory studied in this project is an agglomeration with a very high population density and is subject to rapid soil artificialisation, but at the same time is home to remarkable reservoirs of biodiversity and corridors from the mining activity in the region; this heritage is now on the UNESCO World Heritage List.
France