Frelich, Lee E.Ek, Alan R.Zobel, John M.Page, Kristen M.2015-03-202015-03-202012-06https://hdl.handle.net/11299/1706651 electronic resource (PDF; 18 pages)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.enReport