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.