PARENT SESSION
Contributed Oral Session 162: Landscape Ecology: Management; Vegetation Dynamics
Friday, August 12, 8:00 AM - 11:30 AM, Meeting Room 520 A, Level 5, Palais des congrès de Montréal
Maintaining spatio-temporal landscape connectivity in floating reserve networks under different forest management regimes.
Rayfield, Bronwyn*,1, James, Patrick1, Fortin, Marie-Josée1, Fall, Andrew2, 1 University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada2 Gowlland Technologies Ltd., Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
ABSTRACT- To effectively maintain biological diversity through time, reserve networks need to be designed with explicit consideration of species' spatial habitat requirements, including habitat connectivity. The majority of systematic approaches for reserve design focus on current patterns of one or more focal species' habitat while disregarding natural and anthropogenic processes which may generate or threaten those patterns. Reserve areas that are fixed in space may become unsuitable over time and cease to exemplify the target attributes for which they were originally selected. Therefore a dynamic approach to reserve network selection should be adopted wherein spatial habitat criteria are re-assessed over time. Here, we present a multi-scale method to select floating reserve networks using graph theory and spatial pattern analysis based on the habitat requirements and landscape connectivity for a suite of focal species. We employed this method to identify floating reserve networks in a simulated boreal forest landscape subject to different forest management regimes ranging from no harvest, to block cut harvest, to age-targeted harvest. Stochastic fire and successional processes, in the absence of a management regime, were sufficient to cause a static reserve network to become unsuitable for focal species persistence over time. Under different forest management regimes, attributes of the floating reserve networks varied in terms of the amount of area that met focal species' habitat requirements. The age-targeted harvest regime provided more flexibility in the spatial location of reserve sites by maintaining a fixed proportion of trees in those age classes required for focal species' habitat. This work presents a novel method for floating reserve selection and illustrates the importance of incorporating dynamic properties of both protected and unprotected areas into reserve network design.
Key words: reserve design, graph theory, connectivity, spatial