Elizabeth A Hunter

Upland pine ecosystems in USFWS Region 4 can support many trust species, but management is often directed at only a single species. At Piedmont NWR in central Georgia, management is focused on the Red-cockaded Woodpecker, but several other species (including Bachman’s Sparrow and Northern Bobwhite) could be benefited by slight alterations to management (e.g., more frequent burning or smaller burn units). We will build habitat use models using remotely sensed data and existing information on species occurrence at Piedmont NWR to determine how each of these species responds to management related to prescribed burning. We will then estimate how well these models perform both at Piedmont NWR (using newly collected groundtruthing...

Categories: Project

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...