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Evaluating Effects of Localized Habitat Manipulations on Landscape-level Dynamics of White-footed Mouse Populations
Citation:
GREAR, J. S. Evaluating Effects of Localized Habitat Manipulations on Landscape-level Dynamics of White-footed Mouse Populations. Presented at US EPA Regional Science Workshop: Landscape/Biodiversit Change and Lyme Disease - Science and Application, Chelmsford, MA, September 22 - 23, 2009.
Impact/Purpose:
This presentation describes the spatial population ecology of the white-footed mouse, which is a major Lyme disease reservoir. The presentation also describes potential responses of mouse populations to habitat change.
Description:
Due to complex population dynamics and migration behaviors, the well-being of animal populations that host human diseases sometimes varies across landscapes in ways that cannot be deduced from geographic abundance patterns alone. In such cases, efficient management of ecological characteristics that control disease prevalence may be difficult to achieve. This presentation describes solutions to this problem using a combination of intensive field-based analyses of demography and migration and spatial matrix models of white-footed mouse populations (Peromyscus leucopus). Using landscape-scale field experiments, results of this work show how small-scale habitat manipulations can affect population dynamics over the larger landscape. The presentation also describes the level of effort required to produce this knowledge, in this case through an extramural collaboration, and some of the benefits it provides to the management of disease vector populations.