  Wildlife corridors are components of landscapes, which facilitate the
movement of organisms and processes between areas of intact habitat, and thus
provide landscape corridor. Corridors are thus regions within a given landscape
that generally comprise native vegetation, and connect otherwise fragmented,
disconnected, non-contiguous wildlife habitat patches in the landscape. The
purpose of designing corridors as a conservation strategy is primarily to
counter, and to the extent possible, mitigate the impacts of habitat
fragmentation and loss on the biodiversity of the landscape, as well as support
continuance of land use for essential local and global economic activities in
the region of reference. In this paper, we use game theory and graph theory to
model and design a wildlife corridor network in the Central India Eastern Ghats
landscape complex, with tiger (Panthera tigris tigris) as the focal species. We
construct a graph using the habitat patches supporting wild tiger populations
in the landscape complex as vertices and the possible paths between these
vertices as edges. A cost matrix is constructed to indicate the cost incurred
by the tiger for passage between the habitat patches in the landscape, by
modelling a two-person Prisoners Dilemma game. A minimum spanning tree is then
obtained by employing Kruskals algorithm, which would suggest a feasible tiger
corridor network for the tiger population within the landscape complex.
Additionally, analysis of the graph is done using various centrality measures,
in order to identify and focus on potentially important habitat patches, and
their potential community structure. Correlation analysis is performed on the
centrality indices to draw out interesting trends in the network.
