25 Years Of Aspen Wildlife Habitat Restoration on the Beartooth Ranger District, Custer Gallatin National Forest

Aspen (Populus tremuloides) is one of the most biologically diverse ecosystems in the Intermountain West. Aspen is an important wildlife habitat, providing forage, cover, shade, and nesting for birds, small mammals, big game, and forest carnivores.  Upland game birds, particularly ruffed grouse (Bonasa umbellus), are associated with aspen.  Ruffed grouse are a habitat indicator species for aspen communities in the Custer National Forest Plan.  Montana’s Comprehensive Fish and Wildlife Conservation Strategy (2005) identified aspen as a community type of greatest conservation need due to altered natural fire regimes. Although aspen is a rare vegetation component on the Custer Gallatin National Forest, the Beartooth Ranger District supports relatively large expanses of aspen along the Beartooth Mountain Face.   Many of these aspen communities had converted to conifers, or were declining in health.  In recognition of this opportunity to restore wildlife habitat, a management plan was developed in 1990, featuring ruffed grouse.  Since 1990, crews have treated about 141 aspen stands on about 400 acres.  Methods included prescribed burning and using chainsaws and other hand tools, resulting in the creation of a mosaic of aspen size and age classes and drumming logs that fulfill the yearlong habitat needs of ruffed grouse.  Funding for these treatments came largely from a partnership between the Beartooth Ranger District and Montana’s Upland Bird Program. Wildlife observed using treated aspen stands included a diverse array of cavity and non-cavity nesting birds, including ruffed grouse, small mammals and big game, especially moose (Alces alces)

Ensemble Habitat Suitability Modeling to Guide Conservation of Black-Backed Woodpeckers

Conservation of black-backed woodpecker (Picoides arcticus), a burned-forest specialist, is challenged by the unpredictable availability of suitable habitat. Habitat models calibrated with data from previous wildfires can be used to predict habitat suitability in newly fire-affected areas. Predictive accuracy of habitat models depends on how well statistical relationships reflect actual ecological relationships. We predicted habitat suitability for Black-backed Woodpecker at Montana post-wildfire forests (? 6 years postfire) east of the continental divide using models calibrated with nest location data from wildlfire locations in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. We developed 6 habitat models, including one partitioned Mahalanobis model, two Maxent models, and 3 weighted logistic regression models with combinations of seven environmental variables describing burn severity, topography, and pre-fire canopy cover. We converted continuous habitat suitability indices (HSIs) into binary predictions (suitable or unsuitable) and combined predictions using and ensemble approach; we compiled the number of models (0–6) predicting locations (30×30-m pixels) as suitable. Habitat models represented different hypotheses regarding true ecological relationships, making inferences from ensemble predictions robust to uncertainties in the form of these relationships. Thirty-five percent of the area burned by eastside Montana wildfires was predicted suitable by either all seven habitat models or none of them (i.e. complete agreement among models). We recommend conservation of areas (e.g., exclusion of post-fire salvage logging) that were consistently predicted suitable by most models, e.g., 32 percent of burned areas predicted suitable by ? 5 models. Additionally, we recommend surveying areas where models disagree to help validate and refine models

Elkhorn Mountains westslope cutthroat trout restoration program, mountain range programmatic assessment : draft environmental assessment /

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Modeling broad‐scale patterns of elk summer resource selection in Montana using regional and population‐specific models

Abstract Understanding animal distribution is important for management of populations and their habitats. Across the western United States, elk (Cervus canadensis) provide important ecological, cultural, and economic benefits and the sound management of their habitats is of vital importance. In western Montana, National Forest lands are managed in part to provide and protect elk habitat needs, and summer elk habitat is managed with consideration to motorized routes. We evaluated the relative importance of nutritional resources, access routes, and other landscape attributes on elk summer resource selection at multiple spatial scales, and compared resource selection among nine different southwestern Montana elk populations to determine the applicability of generalized regional models for informing habitat management recommendations. First, we developed nine population‐specific and two regional summer resource selection models. Second, we evaluated the predictive performance of each model within and among elk populations using cross‐validation scores to identify the best model. We found that in all populations nutritional resources, best represented using normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) metrics, were the most important factors associated with elk summer resource selection. Access routes affected resource selection in all populations; however, the influence of access routes was relatively modest as compared with nutritional resources. Of the access route covariates we considered, density of all routes (i.e., routes open and closed to motorized use) explained most variation in summer elk resource selection. Validation of population‐specific resource selection models among populations revealed that in many cases model predictions extrapolated to areas outside of the development area had modest to poor predictive performance, especially as distance from the modeled population increased. Thus, caution should be used when extrapolating resource selection models based on a single study population to other populations. Regional models of resource selection predicted resource selection across populations better than population‐specific models, particularly when constructed by pooling data from multiple populations, and we recommend these types of models be used to inform regional habitat management policies. Our results suggest that managers should expand any current management paradigm for elk summer habitat that is focused on limiting access route density to also consider nutritional resources as an important component of elk summer habitat