Session Information
| Session | Poster Session | | Date | Monday (2008-04-07) | | Time | 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM | | Room | Grand Terrace |
Presentation Information
| Presenter | Frederic Beaudry | | Title | Applying habitat suitability indices toward landscape-scale planning for Wisconsin’s avian species of greatest conservation need | | Affiliation | University of Wisconsin-Madison | | Authors | Frederic Beaudry, Anna Pidgeon, Volker Radeloff, David Mladenoff | | Keywords | Birds, Conservation, Habitat suitability, Landscape, Wisconsin | | Presentation Type | Poster | Abstract:
To effectively plan conservation actions, it is necessary to simultaneously consider the habitat needs of multiple species across large regions. In Wisconsin, the Wildlife Action Plan has identified a set of Species of Greatest Conservation Need (SGCN). Habitat needs have been identified, and threats have been ascertained for these species. However, many SGCN have different habitat needs and conflicting management requirements. Our goal was to model population viability for the majority of avian SGCN in northern Wisconsin and to determine how habitat requirements for all these species can be met. Our first step was to determine the current landscape-scale habitat availability for individual species. For this step we built Habitat Suitability Indices (HSIs), which are a common tool used to quantify a species’ habitat quality and infer patterns of occupancy, and applied the HSIs to northern Wisconsin. We used landscape-scale habitat data from a variety of sources including USDA’s Forest Inventory and Analysis, National Land Cover Data, and Wisconsin Land Cover Data. Forest spatial patterns, including fragmentation metrics, were obtained using morphological image processing. The habitat variables relevant to each species were integrated in HSI values at the land type association level. Habitat occupation estimates based on the models were validated with data from the Wisconsin Bird Breeding Atlas. HSI models performed better for species with habitat requirements that are well-understood and detectable at the landscape scale (e.g. Boreal Chickadee [Poecile hudsonica], Northern Harrier [Circus cyaneus]). Model accuracy was lowest for species that are rare, poorly known or for which key habitat elements are difficult to map at a large scale. For example, breeding Canada Warblers (Wilsonia canadensis) rely on a thick understory layer, a vegetation component invisible to most remote sensing techniques. For selected species, abundance maps were created by integrating point-count survey data with the HSI maps. Our results allow us to conduct spatially-explicit analyses of population viability, and to compare the demographic consequences of future scenarios for northern Wisconsin’s avian SCGN. The results of these scenarios will determine how to best implement the Wisconsin Wildlife Action Plan’s management actions. |
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