Habitat Relationships of Landbirds in the Northern Region, USDA Forest Service

A series of first-generation habitat-relationships models for 83 bird species were detected in a 3-year study on point counts conducted in association with the USDA Forest Service\u27s Northern Region Landbird Monitoring Program. The models depict probabilities of detection for each of the bird species on 100-m-radius, 10-minute point counts conducted across a series of major vegetation cover types. Based on these models, some bird species appear to be restricted in their habitat distribution to: (1) postfire, standing-dead forests, (2) relatively uncut, older forests, (3) harvested forest types, (4) marshes, (5) riparian environments, and (6) grasslands and sagebrush. Such restricted distributions highlight the need to provide adequate amounts of these cover types to maintain viable species populations. Many bird species were relatively abundant in harvested forests, suggesting a need for nesting success studies because timber harvesting creates unnatural cover types that may elicit settling responses by species that are programmed to respond to similar naturally occurring cover types. Thus, these unnatural cover types could be acting as ecological traps, where species are being attracted to sites where suitability is relatively poor. These preliminary results demonstrate the utility of a landbird monitoring program, and suggest that agencies such as the Forest Service should consider broadening the indicator species concept to monitor groups of species (such as landbirds and butterflies) that can be easily sampled with a single field method. The list of species covered by this program is indeed large enough and ecologically broad enough to help managers predict and monitor the effects of management activities on almost all the major vegetation types in the region. The detail and region-specific nature of this information can be matched by no other database in existence on landbirds, and the information should prove useful to land managers in planning areas that might consist of alternative cover types

Monitoring for Adaptive Management in Coniferous Forests of the Northern Rockies

Monitoring can and should be much more than the effort to track population trends; it can be a proactive effort to understand the effects of human activities on bird populations. It should be an integral part of the adaptive management process. With this in mind, the Northern Region Landbird Monitoring Program has a dual focus: (1) to monitor long-term bird population trends, and (2) to study bird-habitat relationships and management effects. By conducting permanent, longterm monitoring transects every other year, we are free to use the intervening years to study the effects of specific management activities. The coordination and funding is in place to achieve an impressive degree of replication in such studies. These alternate-year monitoring efforts have great potential to get managementoriented results into the hands of managers in the short term, so planning can be improved before long-term trends might reveal a problem. We have conducted several such projects, including the effects of partialcut logging in coniferous forests, and the effects of grazing on willow-riparian bird communities. We discuss here another such project that we initiated in 2001, on bird responses to dry-forest restoration in the northern Rockies. Ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) stands have been greatly altered from historical conditions due to logging and fire suppression. Active treatment of ponderosa pine forests to reverse historical trends is a recent management direction involving wellfinanced, regionally coordinated restoration efforts. The widespread distribution and abundance of planned treatments provided a unique opportunity for a controlled research design (with high replication), including pre- and post-treatment surveys. We present some preliminary results and discuss their relevance to adaptive management

Comparison of bird community indices for riparian restoration planning and monitoring

The use of a bird community index that characterizes ecosystem integrity is very attractive to conservation planners and habitat managers, particularly in the absence of any single focal species. In riparian areas of the western USA, several attempts at arriving at a community index signifying a functioning riparian bird community have been made previously, mostly resorting to expert opinions or national conservation rankings for species weights. Because extensive local and regional bird monitoring data were available for Nevada, we were able to develop three different indices that were derived empirically, rather than from expert opinion. We formally examined the use of three species weighting schemes in comparison with simple species richness, using different definitions of riparian species assemblage size, for the purpose of predicting community response to changes in vegetation structure from riparian restoration. For the three indices, species were weighted according to the following criteria: (1) the degree of riparian habitat specialization based on regional data, (2) the relative conservation ranking of landbird species, and (3) the degree to which a species is under-represented compared to the regional species pool for riparian areas. To evaluate the usefulness of these indices for habitat restoration planning and monitoring, we modeled them using habitat variables that are expected to respond to riparian restoration efforts, using data from 64 sampling sites in the Walker River Basin in Nevada and California. We found that none of the species-weighting schemes performed any better as an index for evaluating overall habitat condition than using species richness alone as a community index. Based on our findings, the use of a fairly complete list of 30–35 riparian specialists appears to be the best indicator group for predicting the response of bird communities to the restoration of riparian vegetation

Comparison of bird community indices for riparian restoration planning and monitoring

The use of a bird community index that characterizes ecosystem integrity is very attractive to conservation planners and habitat managers, particularly in the absence of any single focal species. In riparian areas of the western USA, several attempts at arriving at a community index signifying a functioning riparian bird community have been made previously, mostly resorting to expert opinions or national conservation rankings for species weights. Because extensive local and regional bird monitoring data were available for Nevada, we were able to develop three different indices that were derived empirically, rather than from expert opinion. We formally examined the use of three species weighting schemes in comparison with simple species richness, using different definitions of riparian species assemblage size, for the purpose of predicting community response to changes in vegetation structure from riparian restoration. For the three indices, species were weighted according to the following criteria: (1) the degree of riparian habitat specialization based on regional data, (2) the relative conservation ranking of landbird species, and (3) the degree to which a species is under-represented compared to the regional species pool for riparian areas. To evaluate the usefulness of these indices for habitat restoration planning and monitoring, we modeled them using habitat variables that are expected to respond to riparian restoration efforts, using data from 64 sampling sites in the Walker River Basin in Nevada and California. We found that none of the species-weighting schemes performed any better as an index for evaluating overall habitat condition than using species richness alone as a community index. Based on our findings, the use of a fairly complete list of 30–35 riparian specialists appears to be the best indicator group for predicting the response of bird communities to the restoration of riparian vegetation

Criminology or Zemiology? Yes, please! on the refusal of choice between false alternatives

Buried deep within the zemiological movement and its supportive literature is the implicit assumption that the word zemia, the organising concept around which zemiology is built, simply represents ‘the Greek word for harm’. This interpretation has supported numerous drives to ‘move beyond criminology’ and erect strict borders between the study of crime and harm. However, a deeper, albeit still rather brief, exploration of zemia reveals that it possesses a broader range of meaning than that commonly afforded to it. By beginning to unpick zemia’s semantic genealogy, it appears that the conventional use of the word to support the imposition of false alternatives between criminology and zemiology is untenable. Accordingly, this chapter attempts to foreground a more integrated approach to the study of crime and harm

Sketching women in court: The visual construction of co-accused women in court drawings

This paper explores the visual construction and representation of co-accused women offenders in court drawings. It utilises three case studies of female co-defendants who appeared in the England and Wales court system between 2003 and 2013. In doing so this paper falls into three parts. The first part considers the emergence of the sub-discipline, visual criminology and examines what is known about the visual representation of female offenders. The second part presents the findings of an empirical investigation, which involved engaging in a critical, reflexive visual analysis of a selection of court drawings of three female co-offenders. The third part discusses the ways in which the court artists' interpretation, the conventions of court sketching, and motifs of female offenders as secondary actors, drew on existing myths and prejudices by representing the women as listening, remorseless ‘others’

Moral Panics and the Transgressive Other

The concept of moral panic arose out of a particular conjuncture of political, social and theoretical circumstances; specifically the events of 1968, the social transformations of the late 1960s and the synthesis and energizing of New Deviancy and subcultural theory in British criminology centering on the NDC (National Deviancy Conference) and the CCCS (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies). This work evoked Mills’s Sociological Imagination: the placing of individual problems as public issues, the relation of the individual to his or her particular time and social structure, and the effect of social dynamics on the psychological and psychodynamics on the social. The sociological imagination is not a constant but is greatly enhanced at times of change: it is this imagination which engenders transformative politics. Such an analysis clearly demands placing both human actors and reactors, in this instance, ‘deviants’ and moral panickers, in structure and historical time and to examine both the immediate and deep roots of their behaviour. There is a tendency in these neo-liberal times to view moral panics as simple mistakes in rationality generated perhaps by the mass media or rumour. In this process any link between the individual and the social structure, between historical period and social conflict, is lost. In particular the peculiar ‘rational irrationality’ of moral panics is obfuscated, the link between social structure and individual belief diminished, and attempts to utilize moral panics to stymie social change and transformative politics obscured