Collaborative Research: Developing a Predictive Approach for Relating Landscape Attributes to Carnivore Distributions: A Case Study in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem

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This study will link the distribution, pattern of movement, and resource use of martens in different forest habitats using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in order to determine the marten's response to habitat change at varying spatial scales. We will determine the scale at which marten movement is most sensitive to the arrangement of physical and vegetation structure, characteristics that are frequently altered by human use of forest lands. Most data will be gathered during the winter when martens show strongly selective patterns of movement and resource use. Our methods will combine snowtracking of martens and DNA 'fingerprinting" from fur samples collected by hairsnares to estimate abundance and movement in relation to habitat structure determined from NASA satellite imagery and U. S. Forest Service data. Models will be developed to evaluate how the scale of vegetative and weather variables explicitly influence marten resource use, and how varying levels of forest fragmentation influence movement patterns and population dispersion relative to landscape attributes. The non-intrusive, low-cost methods employed by this study are unique additions to forest ecology and management, and will play an important role as we move to large-scale and long-term management of sustainable ecosystems and regions.