Wildlife Population Restoration - Session 4 - Lecture Objectives

Question 1

Why is geographic scale important? what are the 4 levels of scale?

Answer 1

Different animals operate at different scales, and wildlife-habitat relationships are scale-dependent

The 4 scales are:
- geographic range
- home range
- specific sites
- resource/microsite level

Question 2

What are three concerns about the ‘resource use/habitat use’ concept that needs to be acknowledged and removed?

Answer 2

• Biologists/restorationists often ignore the the temporal variation in resource use
• Fundamental concepts need to be well-defined and understood
• Habitat terms are imprecise and ambiguous

Question 3

How can conspecific attraction benefit restoration goals (1) or possibly significantly bias our understanding of animals’ use of ‘habitat’ (2)?

Answer 3

(1) Conspecific attraction can be used to enhance the occupation of restoration sites (choose sites that already have individuals on it).
(2) - Absence of animals doesn’t mean that a site is inappropriate for occupancy
- Need to understand why they use some habitat and not others
- Criticially evaluate baseline information

Question 4

Follow-up to question 4 (conspecific attraction): What should you look for/do to identify this potential bias?

Answer 4

• Inconsistencies in the results of similar studies?
• Inconsistencies in the observations and study results

Question 5

When measuring animal-habitat attributes, what are you measuring?

Answer 5

• Movement corridors (e.g., dispersal, migration)
• The land animals occupy during breeding and nonbreeding seasons
• Not just vegetation… e.g., water for mountain beavers

Question 6

Does habitat availability equal habitat abundance – explain your answer.

Answer 6

• No, availability =/= abundance
• Its not easy to assess resource availability from an animal’s perspective
• measuring actual resource availability is essential for understanding the ecology/habitat of the individual,
• ‘Availability’ isn’t usually measured because it’s hard to determining what is/isn’t available

Question 7

Animals go through a series of increasingly refined selection decisions:

Describe the hierarchy of these decisions and,

Explain why restorationists need to identify this hierarchy

Answer 7

Animals select:
- a geographic area
- then a combination of elevation, slope, and vegetation type;
- Followed by specific locations to forage, breed, or rest;
- Followed by specific items (e.g., food type, mate choice, den site)

Must match the goal of a restoration plan properly with the appropriate scale of study

Question 8

Should restorationists focus on the realized or optimal physiological niche? Why?

Answer 8

• Restorationists need to know the optimal physiological niche as;
• These are the conditions in which, with appropriate management, the species does best,
• A critical question to ask is not ‘does the animal occur here?’ but ‘should the animal occur here?’ - what stressor is preventing its occurence

Question 9

Should restorationists focus on restoring ‘habitat’? Why or why not?

Answer 9

• Restorationists should focus on restoring the functional aspects of habitat
• Otherwise we fail to measure critical limiting resources in ‘habitat’

Question 10

What should you measure in the habitat, and how should you measure it?

Answer 10

• determining factors responsible for occupancy, survival, and fitness
• identify patterns in habitat use by animals
• Pilot study: collect a lot of data, then refine study
• account for variability in measurements/environment

Question 11

discuss how and why reducing variability in your measures is essential

Answer 11

• It is critical to understand the variability inherent in the system to design a study
• Variability must be generally understood, and the sampling designed to capture it
• A more robust and efficient approach:
• Gather preliminary data and conduct analyses - reduce variables being collected in the final study (don’t measure what you can, but measure what you should)

Question 12

Why is it important to focus on the ‘why’ question rather than the ‘how’ question? Why is this particularly important when combining results from studies at different scales?

Answer 12

These ‘why’ questions, are more powerful than those that draw correlations between animal abundance and a list of habitat factors

Question 13

What are two concerns about using density as a baseline to evaluate habitat quality?

Answer 13

• Density (or indices of) for one scale cannot reliably be extrapolated to larger scales
• Increasing scale will increase the variability of habitat quality
• Density for one population varies across spatial scales
• Variations in abundance are influenced not only by study area size but also by the year of study, site selection, sampling method, trap type, and various other factors

Question 14

Vegetation floristics and structure have different levels of application; when should vegetation floristics be emphasized in habitat assessment versus vegetation structure?

Answer 14

Floristics become increasingly relevant when determining the mechanisms responsible for breeding success and body conditions of animals

Question 15

When should restorationists measure broad-scale or fine-scale habitat resources?

Answer 15

Many of the currently used habitat models operate at a broad habitat scale, including most statewide wildlife-habitat relationships (WHR) constructs, GAP models and habitat suitability index (HSI) models

Question 16

Contrast the use of transects and circular plots for habitat sampling

Answer 16

• Circular plots: easy to establish, mark, measure, and relocate, and
• Estimates of animal numbers within plots can be statistically related to vegetation data in a straightforward manner
• Transects cover relatively large areas and thus make it difficult to relate specific animal observations (or abundances) to particular transect sections

Question 17

What is wrong with using the term habitat?

Answer 17

Habitat generally misses the ‘function’ that induces occupancy, survival, and fecundity

Question 18

How do you know what scale you are restoring?

Answer 18

Depends on goal of a restoration plan/what level of understanding of species is required to achieve it

Question 19

What is the focal-animal approach? What is the primary assumption/point of caution?

Answer 19

Using the presence of an animal as an indication of the habitat being used by the species.

The central assumption of this approach is that measurements indicate the animal’s habitat preferences.

A point of caution: you need to know/measure the most important variables