Assessing Forest Structural and Topographic Effects on Habitat Productivity for the Endangered Apennine Brown Bear
Open Access
- 14 July 2021
- Vol. 12 (7), 916
- https://doi.org/10.3390/f12070916
Abstract
Any forest management potentially affects the availability and quality of resources for forest-dwelling wildlife populations, including endangered species. One such species is the Apennine brown bear, a small and unique population living in the central Apennines of Italy. The conservation of this relict bear population is hampered by the lack of knowledge of the fine-scale relationships between productivity of key foods and forest structure, as this prevents the design and implementation of effective forest management plans. To address this issue, we sampled the main structural stand attributes within the bear’s range and used multivariate generalized linear mixed models in a Bayesian framework to relate forest structural attributes to proxies of productivity of key bear foods. We found that hard mast was positively associated with both forest typology and high forest system, but negatively related to both the time elapsed since the last forest utilization and the amount of deadwood. The availability of soft-mast producing species was positively related to past forestry practices but negatively associated with steep slopes historically managed with high tree densities and a low silvicultural disturbance. Our findings also suggest that herb cover was negatively affected by terrain steepness and basal area, while herb productivity was positively affected by northern and southern exposure. Additionally, richness of forest ants was associated with forests characterized by low volume and high density. Our findings confirm that the productivity of natural bear foods is strongly affected by forest structural and topographical characteristics and are relevant as preliminary information for forest management practices to support the long-term conservation of Apennine bears.Keywords
This publication has 113 references indexed in Scilit:
- Biodiversity loss and its impact on humanityNature, 2012
- Using Topography to Meet Wildlife and Fuels Treatment Objectives in Fire-Suppressed LandscapesEnvironmental Management, 2010
- The Apennine Brown Bear: A Critical Review of Its Status and Conservation ProblemsUrsus, 2008
- Linking resources with demography to understand resource limitation for bearsJournal of Applied Ecology, 2007
- Environmental patterns and gradients in the vascular plants and bryophytes of eastern Fennoscandian herb-rich forestsForest Ecology and Management, 2006
- Forest and woodland stand structural complexity: Its definition and measurementForest Ecology and Management, 2005
- Bayesian Measures of Model Complexity and FitJournal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B: Statistical Methodology, 2002
- Individual variation in acorn production by five species of southern Appalachian oaksForest Ecology and Management, 2000
- Black bears as ant-eaters: seasonal associations between bear myrmecophagy and ant ecology in north-central MinnesotaCanadian Journal of Zoology, 1997
- Logging and Wildfire Influence on Grizzly Bear Habitat in Northwestern MontanaBears: Their Biology and Management, 1983