Planning a multiregional monitoring effort for forest carnivores

Opportunity and Vision

The USDA Forest Service has a long history of leadership in researching and monitoring rare carnivores. Successes have stemmed from close collaboration between Forest Service Research and Development (R&D) and the National Forest System (NFS). R&D has designed monitoring efforts, aided in the data collection, and analyzed results while NFS has guided and coordinated field surveys. At this time, multiple Forest Service Regions in the western United States are redesigning monitoring programs to comply with the 2012 Planning Rule’s restoration and management objectives. Concurrently, there has been heightened interest in several rare forest carnivores, namely fishers, lynx, marten, mountain red fox, and wolverines due to high profile listing petitions and lawsuits. There is currently a unique opportunity to coordinate multiple regional efforts and build a state-of-the-art monitoring program that meets the information needs of the agency as it transitions to the 2012 Planning Rule.

Building on Past Success

There have been many local monitoring efforts for rare carnivores. Yet, these species function in populations or meta-populations that exist at much larger scales than individual management units (e.g., project area, National Forest). Most existing efforts provide local information about the presence of individuals. Yet, without the context of a larger, biologically-driven monitoring plan, such efforts provide little information about populations or species viability as a whole, a critical context for understanding local population responses.

When the Forest Service has been able to integrate smaller monitoring efforts into larger programs, the results have been powerful. In the southern Sierra Nevada, an 18-year effort to systematically monitor fishers has provided critical information to inform management of the now endangered population during a period of rapid environmental change due to drought, tree mortality and large-scale wildfire. In the northern U.S. Rocky Mountains, a 5-year collaborative effort lead by R&D scientists lead to a baseline understanding of distribution of fishers that was initially used to remove listing concerns and is now being leveraged into a regional monitoring effort.

Characteristics and Benefits of Coordinated Multiregional Monitoring

These monitoring programs all share several attributes that meet statutory and regulatory requirements, honor partnership commitments and elements of shared stewardship, and meet public expectations on our commitment to monitor wildlife resources:

• Developed with rigorous statistical and survey design that allow population inference
•  at multiple spatial scales. These programs all rely on spatially balanced, hierarchical sampling approaches that allow geographic comparisons among, for example, adjacent national forests and provide project-level planning information.
• Contribute to plan-level and broadscale monitoring requirements of 36 CFR 219.12.
• Provide key information to inform ESA listing decisions as well as project-level consultations.
• Provide opportunities to develop /refine distribution maps and improve understanding of habitat needs.
• Can supersede the need to conduct local, project-level surveys.
• Can help guide cross-boundary conservation work to preclude listing under the ESA.
• Provide opportunities to “intensify” sampling to address specific management questions.
• Implemented through a broad network of state and federal agencies, along with some NGOs to leverage limited funding.
• Provide opportunities for citizen scientist engagement.

Partnerships

This is an ongoing effort, and we are currently working to form a variety of both internal and external partnerships to accomplish this work.

For more information, please contact the project lead.