Welcome to the American Ornithological Society 2018 Annual Conference. We are pleased to have you join us at the lovely Hilton El Conquistador Resort in Tucson, AZ.
Multi-species approaches to wildlife management have become commonplace. These strategies manage different species under a single regime based on shared habitat associations and/or co-occurrence on a landscape. However, managers regularly lack information about species-specific relationships between landscape composition and life history parameters (e.g., vital rates, population growth rates). Therefore, multi-species management often relies on the assumption that species with overlapping habitat associations will respond similarly to management of landscape components based on consideration of a single surrogate or umbrella species. We tested the efficacy of multi-species management in two migratory birds. American Woodcock (Scolopax minor) and Golden-winged Warblers (Vermivora chrysoptera) breed in diverse-forest landscapes of eastern North America and are often associated with young or early-successional forest patches. Management for each of these species is purported to benefit the other, and the two are often presented as the game and non-game flagship species for young forest initiatives. We used demographic data, collected concurrently on a landscape shared by these species in Minnesota, to create spatially-explicit models of full-season productivity (i.e., the number of juveniles raised to independence from adult care) and compare productivity between species across the landscape. We found significant negative relationships in full-season productivity between these species at all spatial scales we measured (1 m2 – 100 ha). Our results suggest that American Woodcock and Golden-winged Warblers have opposing relationships with the composition and configuration of forested landscapes, and therefore likely do not respond similarly to any individual management action at any relevant spatial scale.
