Regional and National Issues for Forest Wildlife Research and Management

Abstract

Abstract Biologists and managers face a broad range of issues related to research and management of forest wildlife. To assess current trends in research, I reviewed 12 scientific journals (1992–2001) that published articles on wildlife, general ecology, and forestry and summarized articles by location, topic, issue, and species. To assess management concerns and issues, I interviewed professional biologists from across the United States, asking their opinions on important forest wildlife topics, approaches to improve research design, how management differs on public versus private lands, and which species they thought were underrepresented, overrepresented, or of special concern in their region. Most scientific articles focused on habitat selection, effects of forest alteration, and demography of birds and mammals. Herpetofauna (i.e., amphibians and reptiles) and invertebrates, although the subjects of some studies, made up only 10% each of all research papers. Biologists were most concerned with the alteration of forest vegetative structure due to timber harvest and its effects on wildlife populations and communities, but also recognized other issues such as changes in natural disturbance patterns such as fire, effects of road building, and loss of early successional vegetative communities as well as fragmentation of older forests. Most biologists agreed that long-term, large-scale, experimental studies, which document the demographic response of forest wildlife to alterations in forest cover, are needed. FOR. SCI. 48(2):181–189.