Conservation actions on private lands in rural landscapes offer some of the best opportunities for promoting wildlife-friendly landscapes near protected areas.
Amazing teamwork leads to conservation outcomes. I've have the pleasure of working with a team of scientists and conservation practitioners for over 15 years to develop approaches for promoting wildlife-friendly practices in local decisions regarding private lands stewardship and management. See below for the citations and abstracts for some of my favorite greatest hits papers. Through deliberate on-the-ground work with local partners, recommendations from these papers are becoming durable conservation actions to benefit wildlife. Our best work is yet to come along with actual blogs on the conservation outcomes, many of which are in progress and will have positive implications for wildlife on private lands.
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Citation: Glennon, M.J., H.E. Kretser, 2013. Size of the ecological effect zone associated with exurban development in the Adirondack Park, NY. Landscape and Urban Planning 112:10-17.
Abstract: Exurban development represents a threat to wildlife communities and ecological integrity in rural landscapes worldwide and recent work has suggested that its ecological impacts can be similar to those associated with more characteristically urban development patterns. Despite the large scope and rapid pace of exurbanization, understanding of its ecological consequences is incomplete and most North American research has occurred in the western United States. The ecological impact zone denotes the area surrounding a home which should be considered affected habitat and has been shown to be demonstrably larger than the actual footprint of homes and lawns. We conducted a study to determine whether an impact zone of 180 m identified for a shrub-oak community in the Rocky Mountain west was applicable in an eastern, closed forest system. We sampled bird communities at the forest/lawn edge of exurban homes, and at 200- and 400-m in surrounding forest and modeled occupancy at increasing distances from residential structures for human-adapted, human-sensitive, and neutral species. Occupancy rates of human-adapted and human-sensitive species were different (36% higher and 26% lower, respectively) at points near homes versus those in surrounding forest. Our findings indicate a similarity in the effects of exurban homes on avian communities and the size of the ecological impact zone in these structurally different eastern and western North American landscapes. This similarity suggests the possibility that human behaviors associated with exurban homes may play a larger role in shaping avian community characteristics nearby than do habitat alterations created by construction and clearing.
Link to News: Science Daily 2013
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Citation: Glennon, M.J., H.E. Kretser, and J.A. Hilty. 2015 Identifying common patterns in diverse systems: effects of exurban development on birds of the Adirondack Park and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, USA. Environmental Management 55(2):453-66.
Abstract: We examined the impacts of exurban development on bird communities in Essex County, New York and Madison County, Montana by comparing differences in abundance of songbirds between subdivisions and control sites in both regions. We hypothesized that impacts to bird communities would be greater in the relatively homogeneous, closed canopy Adirondack forest of northern New York State than they would be in the more naturally heterogeneous grasslands interspersed with trees and shrubs of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. We examined birds in 5 functional groups expected to be responsive to exurban development, and determined relative abundance within subdivisions and control sites across these two distinct regions. We found little support for our hypothesis. For birds in the area sensitive, low nesting, and Neotropical migrant functional groups, relative abundance was lower in subdivisions in the Adirondacks and in Madison County, while relative abundance of edge specialists was greater in subdivisions in both regions. The direction and magnitude of change in the avian communities between subdivisions and controls was similar in both regions for all guilds except edge specialists. These similarities across diverse ecosystems suggest that the ecological context of the encompassing region may be less important than other elements in shaping avian communities in exurban systems. This finding suggests that humans and their specific behaviors and activities in exurban areas may be underappreciated but potentially important drivers of change in these regions.
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