Soricid abundance in partial overstory removal harvests and riparian areas in an industrial forest landscape of the central Appalachians

Response of soricid populations to repeated fire and fuel reduction treatments in the southern Appalachian Mountains

“…Our results support other studies that have documented limited shrew response to less intensive habitat disturbances (Ford et al, 1999;Ford and Rodrigue, 2001;Greenberg and Miller, 2004). Although Ford et al (2002) reported minimal shrew response to habitat disturbances that substantially reduced canopy cover and leaf litter, other studies outside of the Appalachian Mountains indicated that species such as the least shrew may favor more open habitats maintained by disturbance while southeastern shrews more commonly occur in forested areas (Howell, 1954;Wolfe and Esher, 1981;Loeb, 1999;.…”

Soricid response to coarse woody debris manipulations in Coastal Plain loblolly pine forests

“…Similarly, S. monticolus and S. trowbridgii reproduction decreased following CWD removal in Pacific Northwest hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla) stands (Lee, 1995). Conversely, occurrence of juvenile and adult B. brevicauda, S. cinereus, and S. fumeus did not differ among timber harvest treatments in central Appalachian northern hardwood forests despite CWD reductions following harvest treatment (Ford and Rodrigue, 2001). Because our study did not address female reproductive rate or dispersal patterns, our age class analysis may be insufficient to determine CWD manipulation influence on shrew demographics.…”

“…However, attempts to correlate shrew capture rates with CWD volume and density have been equivocal. Although shrew abundance has been positively correlated with CWD in southern Appalachian Mountain (Maidens et al, 1998;Brannon, 2000) and southeastern Coastal Plain (Cromer et al, 2007) hardwood forest communities, other research indicates shrew abundance is independent of CWD availability, suggesting that downed volumes characteristic of hardwood forests may be sufficiently high that CWD rarely becomes limiting (Ford et al, 1997;Ford and Rodrigue, 2001). However, CWD abundance in managed pine stands of the southeastern Coastal Plain is far lower and potentially more limiting for shrews than that of other forest types and physiographic regions of the Southeast (McMinn and Hardt, 1996).…”

Forest-floor temperatures and soil moisture across riparian zones on first- to third-order headwater streams in southern New England, USA

“…Studies have failed to identify differences in small mammal communities in North Carolina (Laerm et al, 1999) and West Virginia (Osbourne et al, 2005), soricids in West Virginia (Ford and Rodrigue, 2001), or eastern boreal conifer bird communities (Whitaker and Montevecchi, 1997;Meiklejohn and Hughes, 1999) between riparian (stream side) and upland forest. The authors ascribe these findings to a lack of a clear riparian vegetative community along low-order streams in these forests.…”