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MODELING WILDLIFE HABITAT SUITABILITY IN THE WILLAMETTE BASIN: A COMPARISON OF PAST, PRESENT AND A RANGE OF POSSIBLE FUTURES (CA. 2050)
Citation:
Haggerty, P., P. Adamus, J Baker, M. Santelmann, N H. Schumaker, AND R D. White. MODELING WILDLIFE HABITAT SUITABILITY IN THE WILLAMETTE BASIN: A COMPARISON OF PAST, PRESENT AND A RANGE OF POSSIBLE FUTURES (CA. 2050). Presented at 2001 Joint Annual Meeting of American Fisheries Society and the Wildlife Society, Portland, OR, February 14-16, 2001.
Description:
The effects of three possible land use futures in the Willamette Basin are evaluated with respect to present and historic conditions of wildlife habitat. Basin wide land use/land cover maps were developed by the Pacific Northwest Ecosystem Research Consortium (PNW-ERC) in cooperation with the Willamette Valley Livability Forum, a stakeholder group of citizens established by the Governor of Oregon to help shape a vision of growth for the next 50 years. Historic conditions were derived from maps developed from 19th century surveyors notes and other historic sources, while maps of current conditions were generated from TM imagery augmented with information from field visits and aerial photography. Potential future land covers were developed based on three sets of assumptions regarding population growth, regulatory and economic conditions under regimes of a) 1990 regulatory procedures, b) a high development theme, and c) a high conservation alternative.
Thirty-four wildlife habitat classes were derived from the PNW-ERC classification. Habitat suitability scores (1 ? 10 with 10 as most preferred) for each habitat class were generated for 279 breeding vertebrate species by panels of local biologists. The panels also developed 50 "adjacency" rules, which could potentially modify species scores to reflect landscape arrangement. Geographic screens further refined the area modeled for each species. A set of GIS programs calculated the results as a series of raster maps. GIS outputs were used in Monte Carlo simulations and survival/dispersal modeling using PATCH, a population viability analysis program.