Abstract
Wildlife habitat models are a necessary component of ecosystem management and play a critical role in determining conservation priorities and making management decisions. They are vital to managers who must perform conservation activities with very limited information. As habitat modeling and other conservation projects are implemented there are a multitude of decisions that must be made as to the specific components that will be included in the models, not to mention the sources of these data. First, managers must evaluate to what purpose the models will be applied. For example, if the goal is to assess the coarse-scale distribution of a habitat across a region, then correspondingly coarse environmental data – such as classified land-coverage from satellite imagery – may be suitable. However, if managers wish to predict which forest stands are likely to provide suitable habitat for a species, or to assess the number of acres of suitable habitat on a landscape, then more detail (meaning both the spatial resolution and number of vegetation measurements) is needed to assess which acres are suitable for a species and which are not, as well as whether the spatial arrangement of those areas is appropriate.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the Michigan Department of Natural Resources IFMAP (Integrated Forest Monitoring, Assessment, and Prescription) program for funding the fieldwork described in this chapter, as well as the Maurer Lab students who participated in the project, including; J Skillen, J Nesslage, S Damania, A Axel, J Karl, E Mize, M Cook, and D Lipp. We would also like to thank the editors of this book and two anonymous reviewers for many helpful edits.
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Roberts, L.J., Maurer, B.A., Donovan, M. (2011). Choices and Strategies for Using a Resource Inventory Database to Support Local Wildlife Habitat Monitoring. In: Drew, C., Wiersma, Y., Huettmann, F. (eds) Predictive Species and Habitat Modeling in Landscape Ecology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7390-0_13
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