| Summary: | In Canada, plains bison (Bison bison bison) was assessed by The Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada as threatened. While bison are no longer at risk of demographic extinction, conservation programs remain challenged by the rarity of large populations and most bison are found in small, isolated, and confined herds. In this context, proper assessment of ecological carrying capacity is critical to inform habitat management and conservation efforts for species recovery. Although estimated food-limited carrying capacity is influenced by forage availability, forage requirements, and offtake proportion, it should also consider habitat selection by animals, especially inside confined settings to help avoid overgrazing. To support bison management in Grasslands National Park Canada, we integrated remote sensing, geographic information systems, and resource selection functions (RSFs) to examine variables that were potentially associated with bison habitat selection and return a comprehensive estimate of bison carrying capacity. Relevant variables were then integrated with estimates of forage availability using remote sensing and extrapolated to the bison containment scale. Factors of relevance to the RSFs include vegetation landscape units, slope, distance to water, fence, and road. In particular, bison selected for upland and sloped grasslands, which were characterized by the highest forage availability (1 064.5 kg ha–1 and 1 238.5 kg ha–1), while avoiding water in both growing and dormant seasons. The top-performing RSFs models in growing and dormant seasons were assessed using k-fold cross validation and achieved good predictive capacity (Spearman rank correlation [rs] ≥ 0.83, P < 0.01). Application of traditional clipping biomass samples and remote sensing derived variables is helpful in estimating annual forage quantity for bison (R2 = 0.75, P < 0.05). When accounting for bison resource selection, our model resulted in a carrying capacity estimate of about 0.0424 bison ha–1 or 764–770 bison ...
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