Defining spatial priorities for capercaillieTetrao urogalluslekking landscape conservation in south‐central Finland

Abstract

SummaryAnimals' avoidance of humans or human activities can have several adverse effects on their distribution and abundance, and a frequent tool used by conservation managers to avoid such effects is to designate 'buffer zones' (or set-back distances or protection zones) around centres of animals' distribution within which human activity is restricted.A common method used to prescribe buffer zones involves one or two measures of disturbance distance: 'alert distance' (AD), the distance between the disturbance source and the animal at the point where the animal changes its behaviour in response to the approaching disturbance source, and 'flight initiation distance' (FID), the point at which the animal flushes or otherwise moves away from the approaching disturbance source.Recommendations on 'safe-working distances' (essentially, buffer zones around breeding sites) have been made for a number of UK breeding bird species, but without any objective justification. With recent changes in Scottish legislation on human access to the countryside and protection of some breeding birds' nest sites there was therefore a need to review available information on disturbance distances for 26 'priority' bird species which breed in Scotland.Preliminary assessment revealed few previous studies quantifying disturbance distances for the study species, and so an expert opinion survey was conducted in which opinion was solicited on 'static' and 'active' disturbance distances (i.e. AD and FID, respectively) when birds were approached by a single pedestrian when incubating eggs and when with chicks. The survey resulted in 89 respondents providing 1083 opinions on disturbance distances.It was difficult to validate independently the results of the survey, because relatively few empirical studies had been conducted on disturbance distances for the study species. Subjectively, however, the survey appeared to give similar 4 results to those of research based on quantified field observations, although distance estimates in the expert survey may have been slightly high in some species.A number of descriptive statistics for AD and FID are presented for each of the species from the expert opinion survey, including upper distances which incorporated 90 % of opinions on AD (although it is highlighted that AD is probably impossible to measure in practice for many species when breeding).Species accounts, describing the results of a literature review for each study species (and related species) on disturbance distances, are also presented and include published information on AD and FID, responses to a number of disturbance sources, previously prescribed buffer zones and forestry practices, when relevant.Expert opinion is typically used as a stopgap in research as a bridge between empirical evidence and policy (although our review suggested that it is probably frequently misused in this field by not being a temporary measure and with insufficient validation) and, given the shortage of empirical field studies, it is recommended that the expert survey r...

Estimating the conservation value of protected areas in Maritime Canada for two species at risk: the Olive-sided Flycatcher (Contopus cooperi) and Canada Warbler (Cardellina canadensis)

“…To inform management of populations of these focal species in national parks, it is necessary to make accurate predictions while simultaneously achieving a resolution precise enough for management planning. The resolution of SDMs should ideally be determined by the size of forest stands in the region, the scale of habitat selection for the target organism, and the scale of management units (Sirkiä et al 2012, Aguirre-Gutiérrez et al 2013, Pradervand et al 2014). In practice, most SDMs are constructed to reflect the resolution of available data layers (predictions can only be as fine as the coarsest layer of the input data) or limited computing power (Franklin 2009).…”

Shifting from even-aged management to less intensive forestry in varying proportions of forest land in Finland: impacts on carbon storage, harvest removals, and harvesting costs

“…The areas shifted between the wood availability categories were selected based on conservation value predicted for each NFI plot as a function of site characteristics and species-specific volume and mean diameter of the growing stock . Similar proxy values have been used for conservation (Lehtomäki et al 2009;Arponen et al 2012;Sirkiä et al 2012) or management prioritization (Vauhkonen and Ruotsalainen 2017), when plant mapping data have not been available for more detailed analyses. The application of the functions yielded the highest conservation values for forests with large trees, more than one species, and high site fertility.…”

What Data to Use for Forest Conservation Planning? A Comparison of Coarse Open and Detailed Proprietary Forest Inventory Data in Finland

“…[ 62 , 73 , 74 ]). In Finland, the MS-NFI is being used mostly for regional level forestry planning, but it has also been used for large-scale conservation prioritization studies [ 13 , 74 , 75 ]. The MS-NFI data has been publicly available since late 2012, the thematic maps can be viewed through a web portal and the rasters can be downloaded through a file service [ 76 ].…”

“…We transformed the average diameter of the growing stock per tree species group by a sigmoidal benefit function (see S1 Appendix and S1 Fig ) and then multiplied the transformed value by the volume of the growing stock. A similar approach has been used earlier in large-scale conservation prioritizations [ 13 , 74 ] and in species-oriented prioritization [ 75 ].…”

“…We encourage the reader to refer to a large body of existing literature for the conceptual background [ 88 , 90 , 91 ], the exact operational principles [ 20 , 89 ], and the different applications of Zonation (e.g. [ 74 , 75 , 92 , 93 ]).…”