Designing Sustainable Landscapes: Representative Species Model: Virginia Rail (Rallus limicola)

Virginia Rail was selected as a representative species for the Designing Sustainable Landscapes project of the North Atlantic LCC (https://scholarworks.umass.edu/designing_sustainable_landscapes/). The habitat clusters (ecological systems) and associated wildlife species that it represents are freshwater marshes and oligohaline tidal marshes. The Landscape Capability (LC) index integrates habitat capability and climate suitability into a single index that reflects the relative capacity of a site to support the species.