Predicting Nesting Habitat of Northern Goshawks in Mixed Aspen-Lodgepole Pine Forests in a High-Elevation Shrub-Steppe Dominated Landscape

• Published in: Open Journal of Ecology
• Main Authors: Miller, Robert A., Carlisle, Jay D., Bechard, Marc J., Santini, Dena
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: ScholarWorks 2013
• Subjects: Accipiter gentilis; Breeding Ecology; Habitat; Idaho; Nest Model; Northern Goshawk; Animal Sciences
• Online Access: https://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/ibo_facpubs/16; https://doi.org/10.4236/oje.2013.32013; https://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/context/ibo_facpubs/article/1015/viewcontent/Carlisle___Predicting_nesting_habitat.pdf

We developed a habitat suitability model for predicting nest locations of breeding Northern Goshawks (Accipiter gentilis) in the high-elevation mixed forest and shrub-steppe habitat of south-central Idaho, USA. We used elevation, slope, aspect, ruggedness, distance-to-water, canopy cover, and individual bands of Landsat imagery as predictors for known nest locations with logistic regression. We found goshawks prefer to nest in gently-sloping, east-facing, non-rugged areas of dense aspen and lodgepole pine forests with low reflectance in green (0.53 - 0.61 μm) wavelengths during the breeding season. We used the model results to classify our 43,169 hectare study area into nesting suitability categories: well suited (8.8%), marginally suited (5.1%), and poorly suited (86.1%). We evaluated our model’s performance by comparing the modeled results to a set of GPS locations of known nests (n = 15) that were not used to develop the model. Observed nest locations matched model results 93.3% of the time for well suited habitat and fell within poorly suited areas only 6.7% of the time. Our method improves on goshawk nesting models developed previously by others and may be applicable for surveying goshawks in adjacent mountain ranges across the northern Great Basin.