Forest Monitoring for Early Successional Species in the Green Mountains

Uploaded by vmc on 02/12/2023

Tags: Monitoring  

Attachments: Slide21.jpeg (363KB) Clarfeld.srt (51KB)

This was presented by Laurence Clarfeld as a part of a series of contributed talks from the 2022 FEMC Annual Conference. To learn more about the conference, visit: https://www.uvm.edu/femc/cooperative/conference/2022. Near the turn of the century, most of Vermont's forests had been cleared for logging and pasturing. The past hundred and twenty years has seen a remarkable recovery with > 60% increase in forest cover throughout the state. This has been a great success story for the state's forest-dwelling wildlife species. However, as forests have matured, species that required early successional habitat (ESH) have declined. In spring 2022, the Vermont Cooperative Fish & Wildlife Research Unit, Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department, and Green Mountain National Forest, with financial support from Forest Ecosystem Monitoring Cooperative and Ruffed Grouse Society, began acoustic monitoring of nearly 50 sites in the Green Mountain National Forest. Some sites were near recent cuts while others were at control sites in mature forests. The AMMonitor data management and analysis ecosystem is being used to organize, process, and interpret monitoring data and infer the effect of timber harvest on target species that favor ESH, such as Ruffed Grouse, Eastern Towhee, Blue- and Golden-winged Warblers, Mourning Warbler, and others. A more concerted monitoring effort is needed to assess the role of a diversified forest structure on these high priority species. In this talk, we'll provide an overview of this new research endeavor and an update on preliminary findings.