Quantifying and projecting boreal mammal response to landscape change

气候引起的景观变化正在重构生态系统，导致生物多样性下降，令人想起以前的物种灭绝。随着资源开采扩展到北部地区，人为干扰加剧了这种情况。然而，生物多样性管理、保护和养护并不包括影响多物种持久性的预期未来变化。加拿大野生动物是北方人民和全球保护的重要营养、文化和象征来源。在这些动物生活的生态系统中，极地放大增加了干旱、森林火灾和永久冻土融化的频率和严重程度，导致了栖息地的大规模转移。考虑到气候和使用非侵入性方法的文化偏好，数据稀缺且难以收集，但对于了解北方生物多样性变化的现实驱动因素至关重要。确定北方动物发生地点的量化过程，形成对预期变化的预测，并将这些预测与未来的观察进行比较，为检验基本的生态假设提供了机会，同时服务于关键的应用生态需求。其他生态系统也开展了类似的动物生态学工作，北方物种生态学的基础工作已经建立。然而，北方生态系统中有限的生态位冗余与当代快速和可观察的景观变化相结合，为我们在预测生态学方法中测试我们对不断变化的生物多样性驱动因素的理解提供了重要机会。我的长期研究目标是在生态预测的综合框架内预测动物对空间明确的预期人为和自然景观变化的反应。这将通过权衡当前和预期的未来生境和人口状况之间的权衡的定量能力，为当前的管理和保护决策提供信息。这一目标将通过两个短期目标来实现：1，量化动物分布和人口变化的驱动因素；2，在用于预测人口变化时，证明这些关系的局限性和适当应用。目标将通过四个规划来实现：1 .保护区及其周边景观对哺乳动物保护的有效性；2 .北方数据有限物种的密度和分布；3 .预测哺乳动物资源利用向自然和人为景观变化的转变，同时提供考虑到这些知识的野生动物栖息地利用和人口统计的预测。这项研究将进一步深入了解动物在景观变化时获取、利用和响应资源的潜力。它将通过量化和预测关键管理战略的效果来促进应用生态学的进步，以帮助短期和长期的省、地区、土著和联邦的社会经济和保护承诺。

Climate-induced landscape change is restructuring ecosystems resulting in biodiversity declines reminiscent of previous extinctions. This is compounded by anthropogenic disturbance as resource extractions expand into northern regions. Yet biodiversity management, protection, and conservation does not include anticipated future change affecting multi-species persistence. Canadian wildlife represent important nutritional, cultural, and symbolic sources for northern people and global conservation. These animals inhabit an ecosystem where polar amplification is increasing the frequency and severity of drought, forest fires, and permafrost thaw resulting in large habitat shifts. Data is scarce and hard to collect given the climate, and cultural preference to use non-invasive methods, yet important to understand real-world drivers to northern biodiversity change. Quantifying processes that determine where northern animals occur, forming predictions of anticipated changes, and comparing these predictions to future observations provides the opportunity to test fundamental ecological hypotheses while servicing critical applied ecological needs. Similar work on animal ecology has been conducted in many other ecosystems, with foundational work on northern species ecology already established. However, limited niche redundancy within northern systems paired with contemporary rapid and observable landscape change provides an important opportunity to test our understanding of changing biodiversity drivers in a predictive ecology approach. My long-term research goal is to predict animal response to spatially-explicit anticipated anthropogenic and natural landscape changes within an integrated framework of ecological forecasting. This will inform current management and conservation decisions through a quantitative ability to weigh trade-offs between current and anticipated future habitat - and population - conditions. This goal will be obtained through two short-term objectives: O1 quantifying drivers of animal distribution and demographic change, and O2 demonstrating limitations and appropriate applications of these relationships when used to predict population change. Objectives will be achieved by four Plans that quantify I the efficacy of protected areas and their surrounding landscapes for mammal conservation, II density and distribution of a northern data-limited species, III anticipated shifts of mammal resource use to natural and anthropogenic landscape change, while providing projections of IV wildlife habitat use and demography considering this knowledge. This research will establish advancements and insights into the potential for animals to access, use, and respond to resources as landscapes change. It will contribute to advances in applied ecology by quantifying and predicting the effects of key management strategies to aid short and long-term provincial, territorial, Indigenous, and federal socio-economic and conservation commitments.