The decline in population and range of lesser prairie‐chickens (Tympanuchus pallidicinctus) throughout the central and southern Great Plains has raised concerns considering their candidate status under the United States Endangered Species Act. Baseline ecological data for lesser prairie‐chickens are limited, especially for the shinnery oak‐grassland communities of Texas. This information is imperative because lesser prairie‐chickens in shinnery oak grasslands occur at the extreme southwestern edge of their distribution. This geographic region is characterized by hot, arid climates, less fragmentation, and less anthropogenic development than within the remaining core distribution of the species. Thus, large expanses of open rangeland with less anthropogenic development and a climate that is classified as extreme for ground nesting birds may subsequently influence nest ecology, nest survival, and nest site selection differently compared to the rest of the distribution of the species. We investigated the nesting ecology of 50 radio‐tagged lesser prairie‐chicken hens from 2008 to 2011 in the shinnery oak‐grassland communities in west Texas and found a substantial amount of inter‐annual variation in incubation start date and percent of females incubating nests. Prairie‐chickens were less likely to nest near unimproved roads and utility poles and in areas with more bare ground and litter. In contrast, hens selected areas dominated by grasses and shrubs and close to stock tanks to nest. Candidate models including visual obstruction best explained daily nest survival; a 5% increase in visual obstruction improved nest survival probability by 10%. The model‐averaged probability of a nest surviving the incubation period was 0.43 (SE = 0.006; 95% CI: 0.23, 0.56). Our findings indicate that lesser prairie‐chicken reproduction during our study period was dynamic and was correlated with seasonal weather patterns that ultimately promoted greater grass growth earlier in the nesting season that provided visual obstruction from predators. © 2014 The Wildlife Society.
The Southern High Plains is anticipated to experience significant changes in temperature and precipitation due to climate change. These changes may influence the lesser prairie-chicken (Tympanuchus pallidicinctus) in positive or negative ways. We assessed the potential changes in clutch size, incubation start date, and nest survival for lesser prairie-chickens for the years 2050 and 2080 based on modeled predictions of climate change and reproductive data for lesser prairie-chickens from 2001–2011 on the Southern High Plains of Texas and New Mexico. We developed 9 a priori models to assess the relationship between reproductive parameters and biologically relevant weather conditions. We selected weather variable(s) with the most model support and then obtained future predicted values from climatewizard.org. We conducted 1,000 simulations using each reproductive parameter’s linear equation obtained from regression calculations, and the future predicted value for each weather variable to predict future reproductive parameter values for lesser prairie-chickens. There was a high degree of model uncertainty for each reproductive value. Winter temperature had the greatest effect size for all three parameters, suggesting a negative relationship between above-average winter temperature and reproductive output. The above-average winter temperatures are correlated to La Niña events, which negatively affect lesser prairie-chickens through resulting drought conditions. By 2050 and 2080, nest survival was predicted to be below levels considered viable for population persistence; however, our assessment did not consider annual survival of adults, chick survival, or the positive benefit of habitat management and conservation, which may ultimately offset the potentially negative effect of drought on nest survival.
The range of Lesser Prairie-Chickens (Tympanuchus pallidicinctus) spans 4 unique ecoregions along 2 distinct environmental gradients. The Sand Shinnery Oak Prairie ecoregion of the Southern High Plains of New Mexico and Texas is environmentally isolated, warmer, and more arid than the Short-Grass, Sand Sagebrush, and Mixed-Grass Prairie ecoregions in Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and the northeast panhandle of Texas. Weather is known to influence Lesser Prairie-Chicken nest survival in the Sand Shinnery Oak Prairie ecoregion; regional variation may also influence nest microclimate and, ultimately, survival during incubation. To address this question, we placed data loggers adjacent to nests during incubation to quantify temperature and humidity distribution functions in 3 ecoregions. We developed a suite of a priori nest survival models that incorporated derived microclimate parameters and visual obstruction as covariates in Program MARK. We monitored 49 nests in Mixed-Grass, 22 nests in Sand Shinnery Oak, and 30 nests in Short-Grass ecoregions from 2010 to 2014. Our findings indicated that (1) the Sand Shinnery Oak Prairie ecoregion was hotter and drier during incubation than the Mixed- and Short-Grass ecoregions; (2) nest microclimate varied among years within ecoregions; (3) visual obstruction was positively associated with nest survival; but (4) daily nest survival probability decreased by 10% every half-hour when temperature was greater than 34°C and vapor pressure deficit was less than −23 mmHg during the day (about 0600–2100 hours). Our major finding confirmed microclimate thresholds for nest survival under natural conditions across the species' distribution, although Lesser Prairie-Chickens are more likely to experience microclimate conditions that result in nest failures in the Sand Shinnery Oak Prairie ecoregion. The species would benefit from identification of thermal landscapes and management actions that promote cooler, more humid nest microclimates.
How organisms respond to and are influenced by temperature is one of the most fundamental aspects of ecology. Temperature affects animal physiology, behavior, survival, and reproduction. At broader spatial and temporal scales, temperature affects animal distributions, speciation, and evolution. Although entire textbooks have been devoted to how temperature is related to various aspects of basic animal ecology, applied ecologists have only recently begun to address thermal ecology in wildlife research. New investigations of thermal conditions relative to specific wildlife species have generally found tremendous variation within landscapes. Consequently, multiple species have been shown to respond in predictive ways to thermal variation. Variation in temperature can be due to both topoedaphic features inherent in the landscape as well as differences in vegetation structure and composition resulting from management actions. Although consideration of the thermal environment has received consideration for exothermic species, new evidence indicates that it has major implications to endotherms and may become even more critical under novel climate conditions. Rarely does management consider thermal cover explicitly or in a spatiotemporally dynamic way; in our view, this is a major short-coming of current conservation planning and management actions. We argue that thermal environments should be foundational in the understanding of the habitat concept. Furthermore, restoration and management efforts should specifically consider thermal refuge and pinch points-the discrete time or event when thermal conditions experienced by an organism deviate to extreme values relative to average conditions and limit vital rates and space use of that organism. We suggest that future research on thermal environments work at scales relevant to organisms so that management can adequately address the full extent of a species' habitat. Ó 2017 The Authors. Wildlife Society Bulletin published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of The Wildlife Society.KEY WORDS habitat selection, microclimate, operative temperature, space use, thermal environment, thermal refuge.How organisms respond to, and are influenced by, temperature is one of the most fundamental aspects of ecology (Begon et al. 2006). In a proximate sense, temperature affects animal physiology, behavior, survival, and reproduction. Ultimately, temperature affects animal distributions, speciation, and evolution. Entire textbooks have been devoted to how temperature is related to various aspects of animal ecology (Feder 1987, Angilletta 2009, Cossins 2012, Deeming and Reynolds 2015. Despite this basic understanding of the importance of temperature to organisms, empirical evidence on how specific management actions influence thermal environments and how species respond to thermal conditions is largely lacking. As a result, thermal environments are rarely considered in management actions for wildlife, which creates a barrier between understanding how temperature influences species ...
Recent research on environmental DNA (eDNA), genetic material shed by organisms into their environment that can be used for sensitive and species-specific detection, has focused on the ability to collect airborne eDNA released by plants and carried by the wind for use in terrestrial plant populations, including detection of invasive and endangered species. Another possible application of airborne eDNA is to detect changes in plant communities in response to activity or changes on a landscape-scale. Therefore, the goal of this study was to demonstrate how honey mesquite, blue grama, and general plant airborne eDNA changes in response to human activity on a landscape-scale. We monitored airborne eDNA before, during, and after a rangeland restoration effort that included honey mesquite removal. As expected, restoration activity resulted in a massive increase in airborne honey mesquite eDNA. However, we also observed changes in abundance of airborne eDNA from the grass genus Bouteloua, which was not directly associated with the restoration project, and we attribute these changes to both human activity and seasonal trends. Overall, we demonstrate for the first time that activity and changes on a landscape-scale can be tracked using airborne eDNA collection, and we suggest that airborne eDNA has the potential to help monitor and assess ecological restoration projects, track changes due to global warming, or investigate community changes in response to encroachment by invasive species or extirpation of threatened and endangered species.
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