A COMPARISON OF SMALL MAMMAL DIVERSITY IN FORESTED HABITATS TO PRAIRIE HABITATS

Abstract

This report, in its attempt to understand diversity, will focus on small mammals found within and close to Itasca State Park, Minnesota. The two types of habitat that were used to collect our data and to conduct our comparison included forested habitats and prairie habitats. Within the forested habitats, we had a variety of smaller biomes: burned deciduous forest, unburned deciduous forest, burned red pine forest, unburned red pine forest, aspen forest, and bog. As for the prairie habitats, it was harder to get an array of smaller biomes; therefore, we divided this habitat type by region, giving us Rush South, Rush North, Coburn East, Coburn West, Waubun Wet, and Waubun Dry. The questions we hoped to answer in this experiment were as followed: 1) Which communities, inside forest sites or the prairie sites, have more species? 2) Are there any common species to both locations? and 3) To what attributes can we see similarities or differences?