Title
Forest Wildlife Habitat Description and Data for Minnesota Species
Abstract
Forest wildlife habit relationships are important to a wide range of forest management decisions.
This report describes the development and improvement of a forest wildlife habitat model format
for use by natural resource professionals in silvicultural decision making and forest planning.
Specifically, this paper describes rationale, data, and models assembled for describing habitat
suitability indices (HSI) plus guidance for their application. Importantly, this work has also
provided an update of habitat relationship data and model forms for many of the bird, mammal and
amphibian species common to Minnesota. In total, data and models are provided for nearly 200
wildlife species.
HSI are a coarse filter method for considering the impact of forest management on wildlife species
habitats. They are best described as a hypothesis regarding species-habitat relationships. In this
usage, the premise is that there is a functional relationship between habitat suitability and habitat
features that are widely observed at the forest stand level, such as the forest covertype and stand
age class or size class--information which is widely available from systematic forest inventory
data.
The modeling format is intended to allow rapid and straightforward analyses of potential changes
in wildlife habitat for (1) long-term forest-wide planning efforts such as those by large landowners
(forest-based industry, federal, state, and county managed lands), (2) rapid site-specific
on-the-ground assessment of habitat conditions and considerations in timber sale or other project
considerations, and (3) input to environmental review of large forestry-related project proposals.
Sequel papers are under development to describe a PC-based model implementation package and
trials to aid user interpretation of model outputs.
Series/Report Number
Staff paper series (University of Minnesota. Department of Forest Resources);
219
Description
1 electronic resource (PDF; 18 pages)
Suggested Citation
Frelich, Lee E.; Ek, Alan R.; Zobel, John M.; Page, Kristen M..
(2012).
Forest Wildlife Habitat Description and Data for Minnesota Species.
University of Minnesota.
Retrieved from the University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy,
https://hdl.handle.net/11299/170665.