You are here:
Impacts of a human disturbance on greater prairie chickens: Insights from a spatial IBM
Citation:
Schumaker, N., A. Gregory, B. Powers, AND B. Groskinsky. Impacts of a human disturbance on greater prairie chickens: Insights from a spatial IBM. 2016 US-IALE Conference, Asheville, NC, April 03 - 07, 2016.
Impact/Purpose:
Protecting the environment often means finding ways to meet our needs for natural resources while minimizing damage to the environmental systems people depend upon. But identifying management strategies that strike this type of balance can be challenging. This study illustrates how EPA research might inform such a decision-making process. Here, we focus on impacts of land-use change on a grouse species with a complex life history, and use this system as a vehicle for exploring this type of investigation.
Description:
The Flint Hills of Kansas are home to the largest remaining tallgrass prairie ecosystem in North America. The Flint Hills are currently managed under an early season burn-intensive stocking regime, whereby ranchers will ignite the majority of pasture land each year to increase rangeland productivity for cattle, and then stock pastures at high densities for brief periods of time. The Greater Prairie-Chicken (Tympanuchus Cupido) is a regional grassland obligate of conservation concern that both benefits from, and can be harmed by frequent field burning. Greater Prairie-Chicken (GPC) habitat is compromised by shrub encroachment due to lack of fire. Conversely, GPC’s rely on having abundant tall native grass and forbs to hide in during nesting, but if grass becomes too thick it inhibits movement. Thus, the species' ability to both forage and avoid predators varies with time since the last disturbance, and may be optimal when native prairie communities are subjected to 3-6 year burning rotations. Regional stakeholders are interested in how the pattern, frequency, and extent of field burning might be adjusted to balance the resultant economic, ecological, and human health trade-offs, such as prairie conservation, the degradation of air quality, and fires' direct impacts on native plants and animals. Here we describe the development of a spatial IBM for the GPC, and our application of this model to explore this species' response to a proposed shift in fire management away from intensive early season burning towards a patch-burning regime comprised of spatially-distributed multi-year rotations.