Designing Sustainable Landscapes: Representative Species Model: Wood Turtle (Glyptemys insculpta)

Wood Turtle 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 generally comprise of slow-moving moderately sized streams and forest and wetland systems near those streams. 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.