Title
Anthropogenic Disturbance and Population Viability of Woodland Caribou in Ontario
Author(s)
Fryxell, J.M., et al. (including Liu, B.). 2020.
Published
2020
Publisher
The Journal of Wildlife Management
Abstract
One of the most challenging tasks in wildlife conservation and management is to clarify how spatial variation in land cover due to anthropogenic disturbance influences wildlife demography and long‐term viability. To evaluate this, we compared rates of survival and population growth by woodland caribou from 2 study sites in northern Ontario, Canada that differed in the degree of anthropogenic disturbance because of commercial logging and road development, resulting in differences in predation risk due to gray wolves. We applied the spatially explicit PVA model to assess the viability of woodland caribou across 14 woodland caribou ranges in Ontario. Outcomes of these simulations suggest that woodland caribou ranges that have experienced significant levels of commercial forestry activities in the past had annual growth rates <0.89, whereas caribou ranges that had not experienced commercial forestry operations had population growth rates >0.96. These differences were strongly related to regional variation in wolf densities. Our results suggest that increased wolf predation risk due to anthropogenic disturbance is of sufficient magnitude to cause appreciable risk of population decline in woodland caribou in Ontario.
Keywords
apparent competition; boreal; disturbance; forestry; growth rate; model; moose; movement; Ontario; population viability analysis; predation; survival; wolf; woodland caribou
Full Citation
Fryxell, J.M., et al. (including Liu, B.). 2020. Anthropogenic Disturbance and Population Viability of Woodland Caribou in Ontario. The Journal of Wildlife Management, 84(4), p. 636-650.
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