Animal Studies Commons^™

Conservation Of Open-Canopy-Associated Wildlife: Multi-Scale Management Impacts On Imperiled Herpetofauna, Ethan Joseph Royal

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The loss of open-canopy ecosystems throughout North America has precipitated declines in reptile and amphibian species associated with these habitat types. Current efforts to restore open-canopy ecosystems are underway in many areas, but the local distributions of, habitat characteristics required by and the effects of management actions on many herpetofauna species are poorly understood or entirely unknown. Research examining relationships among herpetofauna and their environments is often complicated by the extremely low detectability seen in many studies. We used landscape-scale, assemblage-level surveys to investigate the occupancy patterns and habitat associations of open-canopy-associated herpetofauna in two regions, as well as gain …