Randy Dettmers

Many eastern deciduous forest songbirds continue to experience significant population declines, which are often linked to breeding habitat requirements. Managing breeding habitat for some declining focal species in the eastern deciduous forest will entail managing for canopy heterogeneity and variable forest age classes through canopy disturbance, which are critical factors for optimizing bird species biodiversity. The prevalence of mature forests has remained stable to increasing in recent decades, but young forest conditions are lacking. In the Appalachian region, active forest management on private lands (both institutional and family-owned), in addition to public lands, are instrumental for either reversing...

Cerulean Warblers (Setophaga cerulea) have exhibited multi-decadal, range-wide declines in abundance, causing concern for their long-term persistence. Threats to the species likely occur across their annual cycle, from inadequate landscape-scale (forest cover and fragmentation) and finer-scale (e.g., lack of canopy heterogeneity) forest structure on their breeding grounds to removal or degradation of mid-elevation forested habitat on wintering grounds and degradation/loss of stopover habitats in between. As a result, an assessment of the species􀂶 population dynamics across the full annual cycle (FAC) is necessary to understand the relative role different temporal stages and specific locations play in determining...