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ASSESSING RISKS TO WILDLIFE POPULATIONS FROM MULTPLE STRESSORS: OVERVIEW OF PROBLEMS AND RESEARCH NEEDS
Citation:
Munns Jr., W R. ASSESSING RISKS TO WILDLIFE POPULATIONS FROM MULTPLE STRESSORS: OVERVIEW OF PROBLEMS AND RESEARCH NEEDS. Presented at 10th Annual Conference of the Wildlife Society, Burlington, VT, September 6-10, 2003.
Description:
Wildlife is experiencing increasing pressure from human-induced changes in the landscape. Stressors such as agricultural and urban land use, introduction of invasive and exotic species, alteration of nutrient cycles, direct human disturbance, and toxic chemical exposure directly or indirectly influence the quality and quantity of habitat used by terrestrial and aquatic wildlife. Governmental agencies such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency are required to assess risks to wildlife populations that result from these stressors, yet considerable uncertainty exists with respect to how such assessments should be conducted. This uncertainty is compounded by questions concerning appropriate spatial scales of analysis, extrapolation of response data among species and from individuals to populations, imperfect knowledge and use of limited data sets, and interactions among stressors as they affect wildlife populations. Further, different risk problems require varying degrees of sophistication, methodological refinement, and data quality. These issues suggest a number of research needs to improve methods for wildlife risk assessments. Included are continued development of population dynamics models to evaluate the effects of multiple stressors at varying spatial scales, methods for extrapolating across endpoints and species with reasonable confidence, stressor-response relations and methods for combining them in predictive and diagnostics assessments, and accessible data sets describing the distributions and temporal abundances of terrestrial and aquatic species. Case study application of models and methods for assessing wildlife risk will help to demonstrate their strengths and weaknesses for solving particular risk problems.