Characterizing Habitat Elements and Their Distribution over Several Spatial Scales: The Case of the Fisher

Abstract

Abstract:In past studies of the fisher (Pekania pennanti) most researchers have concluded that fisher habitat must consist of mostly mature to late-seral forest with few, if any, openings. Without doubt, certain elements found in mature to late-seral forests are required by females to successfully rear their young, but some recent work casts doubt on the extent that a continuous canopy of tree coverage and a preponderance of older stands are necessary as long as certain components exist. This paper explores this issue with an attempt to better characterize essential elements of habitat for the female fisher. This characterization is based upon fine-scale inventory plot data that is analyzed across several spatial scales that represent a small neighborhood about den sites, the forest of the 75% kernel density estimate for female home ranges, and the forested region as a whole. We present results of a test of significance in comparing habitat elements across these three scales. Our findings suggest that certain habitat elements typically found in mature to late seral forests must be present at a certain fraction of the landscape for the fisher. The approach described here may be of considerable value in developing guidelines for conservation agreements.

Fishers (Pekania pennanti) are forest structure specialists when resting and generalists when moving: behavior influences resource selection in a northern Rocky Mountain fisher population

“…Finally, foraging fishers may be more tolerant of forest openings and heterogeneity from past management than expected, and willing to trade the risk of using more open canopy for the increase in prey associated with the greater ground cover and understory of early successional stands [ 75 ]. Smith [ 86 ] found that fishers in Oregon continued to use recently thinned habitat in their home ranges given that sufficient den sites and canopy cover > 50% was maintained within 2 km in the home range, Green et al [ 87 ] showed that fishers translocated to an area in the Sierra Nevada of California with high levels of current and historical forest management survived and increased in abundance over 7 years of monitoring, and Niblett et al [ 88 ] found that fisher home ranges in California could contain up to 25% of open canopy provided that enough large trees for den locations were present.…”

Use of GIS Tools in Sustainable Heritage Management—The Importance of Data Generalization in Spatial Modeling

“…The kernel function is based on the quartic kernel function described in [61]. This method finds application in many fields of science, such as: archaeology [65,66], astronomy [67][68][69][70][71], biology [72][73][74][75], forecasting [76,77], environmental protection [78,79], medicine and health studies [80][81][82][83], and many others. Choosing the appropriate bandwidth in KDE is the subject of many studies [84][85][86].…”