Authors: Handel, Michal; Spiegel, Orr;Shwartz, Assaf;

Ecological corridors are a key solution for enhancing landscape connectivity and mitigating biodiversity loss due to fragmentation. Yet, empirical evidence on the factors facilitating viable wildlife movements within areas designated as corridors is scarce. Here, we aim to explore how different landscape attributes and agricultural management practices interact to influence species movement along a proposed national corridor within an intensive agriculture area. Using a cutting-edge animal tracking technology (ATLAS), we monitored at high-resolution (8 seconds fix interval) the regional movements of 16 bird species (with a total of 157 individuals, 10,000 days, and over 57 million localizations). This massive dataset revealed that species differ substantially in their movement behavior and corridor usage. For instance, both white-spectacled bulbul (Pycnonotus xanthopygos) and Syrian woodpecker (Dendrocopos syriacus) strongly avoided cultivated fields within the suggested corridor, while traveling exclusively along uncultivated (wild-growth) field margins. In contrast, other species like the european greenfinch (Chloris chloris) and common kestrel (Falco tinnunculus) readily crossed open fields, resulting in higher connectivity through the landscape. Our findings emphasize the importance of various landscape features for facilitating species-specific movements within the agro-ecosystem and the benefit of high-resolution movement tracking for improving the design and management of effective ecological corridors.