A Framework for Modeling Habitat Quality in Disturbance-prone Areas Demonstrated with Woodland Caribou and Wildfire

Authors
Ellen Whitman
Marc‐André Parisien
David Price
Martin‐Hugues St‐Laurent
Chris Johnson
Evan DeLancey
Dominique Arseneault
Mike Flannigan
Resource Date:
2017

Natural resource managers need adaptable tools for conserving and managing wildlife across landscapes. These tools should use many elements of habitat quality and include natural disturbance, such as large wildfires. We provide a framework that combines three elements of habitat (nutrition, ability to move across the landscape, and predation risk) into a single measure of habitat quality. In this framework, we add the effect of large wildfires, which can dramatically alter the three elements of habitat. Woodland caribou, a species of concern in conservation, is used to illustrate our framework, which we applied to two boreal forest landscapes (one in Alberta and one in Québec). Results showed that patterns of habitat quality were not uniform across the landscape, with some areas being highly suitable for caribou and others being unsuitable. The inclusion of wildfire in this model likely improved the framework by accounting for the potential loss of suitable habitat. The combination of nutrition, ability to move across the landscape, and predation risk into a single measure of habitat quality produced patterns distinct from maps of the individual elements. Regardless of how the three elements were combined to calculate the final habitat suitability measure, areas of very high- and poor-quality habitat were found at consistent locations across the landscape, which provided opportunities for long-term management actions. The framework presented here has the potential to be a useful tool for conservation planning and, furthermore, could be modified and applied to other species, regions, and disturbance regimes ( such as insect outbreaks, floods, and droughts).