PARENT SESSION
Poster Session #8: Conservation Planning and Monitoring.
Monday, August 5. Presentation from 5:00 PM to 6:30 PM. Exhibit Hall B & C, TCC

Evaluating restoration landscapes as wildlife habitat.

Santelmann, Mary^*,1, Lett, Christina¹, Bolte, John¹, ¹ Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR

ABSTRACT- Our research objective is to provide effective software tools for watershed councils to use in prioritizing restoration activities. Watershed councils have many concerns to address and limited funds for restoration activities. Their multiple goals include restoration of wildlife habitat, improvement of water quality, social, economic, and cultural acceptability of actions to watershed residents, and efficient funding of efforts that will maximize system response to current environmental problems. We developed RESTORE, a decision-support system (DSS) for watersheds of the Willamette Valley region, to generate alternative restoration landscapes according to the weighting given the various goals set by the user. RESTORE uses GIS databases of land cover, soils, topography, and other watershed characteristics; rule sets that incorporate landscape characteristics, species habitat associations, and expert judgment regarding the effectiveness of various restoration options in providing habitat to the vertebrate species that occur in our watersheds to generate and evaluate alternative landscapes. The DSS has been applied to the Long Tom Watershed in the southwestern Willamette Valley to generate alternative landscapes of various restoration options that reflect different sets of goals, and different areal extents for applying some type of restoration option to the landscape (e.g. 10% and 25% of watershed area). We evaluate and compare alternative restoration landscapes for their potential as wildlife habitat using the model PATCH (Program to Assist in Tracking Critical Habitat, Shumaker 2001). We compare results of population viability analysis using PATCH for species associated with wetland, forest, shrub, and grassland habitat for twelve restoration landscapes and the current landscape. The results illustrate the differences in population viability of our species among landscapes generated with multiple objectives compared to those generated with the specific goal of restoring habitat. Landscapes generated with multiple goals tend to be better at preserving habitat for wetland and riparian species than for shrub, forest, and grassland species, but may fall short in preventing local extirpations of some species especially when only 10% of the watershed area is restored.

KEY WORDS: restoration, watershed, habitat, multi-objective