Avian and salamander response to young forest management in West Virginia

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on the effects of various young forest habitat management techniques on the avian and salamander community in West Virginia. Wildlife species associated with the nascent stage of forest succession are experiencing precipitous population declines throughout much of the eastern United States due to decreases in the amount of young forest area which have been brought on by changes in disturbance regimes over the past century. As a result, the need to find novel approaches for creating young forest habitats to sustain young forest wildlife populations is necessary. However, young forest habitat creation often negatively affects species that are considered disturbance-avoidant. As a result, I assessed the tradeoffs between creating young forest habitat for disturbance-associated species with the potential negative effects of reducing habitat suitability for disturbance-avoidant species throughout this dissertation. In Chapter 1, I summarize how historical land use practices in West Virginia have created current young forest conditions and the effects that these conditions have had on wildlife species that are specialized in exploiting young forest areas. I also introduce the study sites where this research was conducted and provide chapter objectives and topics of this dissertation. The recent proliferation of linear energy infrastructure throughout the central Appalachian region has prompted managers to explore ways of managing the young forest bird community in association with these long, linear openings but little empirical data exist. At the same time, forest interior songbirds and woodland salamanders are often negatively affected by energy infrastructure within forest dominated landscapes and any young forest management in these landscapes may further degrade habitats for forest interior species. In chapter 2 we studied how harvest size (15 m, 30 m, and 45 m wide) and intensity (14 m2/ha and 4.5 m2/ha residual basal area) of cut-back borders, which are linear tree cuttings adjacent to gas/oil pipeline and utility powerline rights-of-way (ROWs) or wildlife openings, influenced habitat suitability along ROWs and wildlife openings for the young forest and forest interior communities. The objectives of this chapter were to examine whether the implementation of cut-back borders increased habitat suitability for wildlife species and which cut-back border treatments optimized the tradeoff between maximizing positive responses of disturbance-dependent species (i.e., young forest species) while minimizing negative responses of disturbance-avoidant species (i.e., forest interior species). We found that young forest species’ abundances and species richness increased one-year and two-years after treatment, particularly in the 15-m wide borders, likely