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A FRAMEWORK FOR THE ASSESSMENT OF WILDLIFE HABITAT VALUE OF NEW ENGLAND SALT MARSHES
Citation:
MCKINNEY, R. A. AND C. WIGAND. A FRAMEWORK FOR THE ASSESSMENT OF WILDLIFE HABITAT VALUE OF NEW ENGLAND SALT MARSHES. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC, EPA/600/R-06/132 (NTIS PB2007-100979), 2006.
Impact/Purpose:
To provide a framework for assessing the wildlife habitat value of New England salt marshes.
Description:
Resource managers are frequently asked to make decisions that affect the protection and restoration of wetland habitats. The desire is often to base at least some part of this decision process on an assessment of wildlife habitat value, an acknowledged and important wetland function. While protocols currently exist to evaluate wildlife habitat value in freshwater wetlands, there is a lack of stand-alone methods to assess this function for coastal salt marshes, a class of wetland that by the nature of their location are increasingly under intense development pressure from urbanization. In this report, we provide a framework for assessing the wildlife habitat value of New England salt marshes. We summarize the available information on the habitat requirements of 52 bird, 20 mammal, and 6 reptile and amphibian species that use New England salt marsh habitats. We use these data to identify wetland and landscape components important in determining habitat suitability for wildlife species. For each component, we propose several categories that can be used to classify salt marshes for wildlife habitat value. The different categories within each component range from those that indicate that the habitat is unimpaired to those that indicate some degree of impairment. The wetland and landscape components, along with their associated categories, can be used as the basis of an assessment of salt marsh wildlife habitat value.