A Bayesian approach to evaluating habitat for woodland caribou in north-central British Columbia

• Main Authors: R. Scott Mcnay, Bruce G. Marcot, Viktor Brumovsky, Rick Ellis
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2006
• Subjects: Sene; Rangifer tarandus
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.538.7604; http://www.fs.fed.us/pnw/pubs/journals/pnw_2006_mcnay001.pdf

Abstract: Woodland caribou (Rangifer tarandus caribou (Gmelin)) populations are in decline throughout much of their range. With increasingly rapid industrial, recreational, residential, and agricultural development of caribou habitat, tools are required to make clear, knowledgeable, and explainable management decisions to support effective conservation of caribou and their range. We developed a series of Bayesian belief networks to evaluate conservation policy scenarios applied to caribou seasonal range recovery areas. We demonstrate the utility of the networks to articulate ecological un-derstanding among stakeholders, to clarify and explicitly depict threats to seasonal range. We also show how simulated forecasts of spatially explicit seasonal range can be compared with landscape potential with range under assumed con-ditions of natural disturbance. These tools have provided opportunities to operationally define and measure conditions for recovery of caribou in north-central British Columbia. R6sum6: Les populations de caribou des bois (Rangifer tarandus caribou (Gmelin)) sont en dQlin dans la majeure partie de leurs aires naturelles. Avec l'expansion rapide des activitts industrielles, rtcrhtives, rtsidentielles et agricoles dans I'habitat du caribou, des outils sont ntcessaires pour prendre des dtcisions d'amtnagement claires, bien documen-tees et explicables, et ainsi aider ti la conservation du caribou et de ses aires naturelles. Nous avons dtvelopp6 une sene de rtseaux de croyances baytsiens pour tvaluer des sdnarios de politiques de conservation applicables aux quar-tiers de recouvrement saisonniers du caribou. Nous dtmontrons I'utilitt de ces rheaux pour articuler la comprthension