Dynamic models of bioindicators to assess forest sustainability'

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Dynamic models of bio-indicators to assess
forest sustainability.

• Lisa Venier (CFS), Jennie Pearce (Pearce
  Associates Ecological Research), Brendan Wintle
  (University of Melbourne) and Sarah Bekessy (RMIT
  University)

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• Modeling habitat availability for bioindicators
  does not
• Explicitly consider environmental and demographic
  stochasticity
• Capture temporal fluctuations in habitat
  occupancy that affect population persistence
• Explicitly consider the spatial attributes of
  species biology
• Capture the landscape-scale effects of forest
  management activities

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Objective

• to evaluate the utility of combining
  metapopulation models with landscape-level forest
  dynamics models to assess the sustainability of
  forest management practices

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Figure from Akçakaya et al. 2003 
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Fire Simulation

• Natural fire regime
• Pj 110 year return
• Mixed 325 return
• 2000 ha mean
• Fire suppression
• Pj 320 year return
• Mixed 700 return
• 8000 ha mean

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Forest Management Scenarios

• No timber harvesting
• Natural disturbance emulation
• Intensive harvest
• Salvage logging

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Sensitivity Analysis
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Advantages

• Relatively low cost
• Immediacy of information
• Explicit treatment of uncertainty
• Evaluation of alternatives
• Synthesis of knowledge
• Identification of research priorities
• Focus for monitoring

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Limitations

• Potential Habitat Model error
• Hard to incorporate some impacts like edge
  effects
• Need to incorporate specific biodiversity
  prescriptions
• RAMAS has a 500 population limit
• Cannot evaluate the proportional dominance of
  tree species
• Initial age-class and floristic data are a pain
  to define

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Thanks

• Ontario Living Legacy Trust
• Mark Burgman, Jane Elith, Prema Lucas, Mick
  McCarthy (University of Melbourne)
• Mike Flannigan, Tim Lynham (CFS)
• Resit Akçakaya (Applied Biomathematics)
• David Mladenoff (University of Wisconsin)
• Kevin Lawrence, Gillian Eccles, Teri Bonnell,
  Kerrie Wainio-Keizer, Kathy Campbell (CFS)
• Chris Grant, Kandyd Szuba (Domtar)