In both strategic land-use planning assessments and finer-scale planning for landscape units or watersheds, land managers frequently ask “how much habitat is enough?” To answer this question, the Marbled Murrelet Recovery Team needed to assess the relationships between expected regional population sizes of nesting Marbled Murrelets and the area/quality of suitable nesting habitat in the coastal forests of British Columbia (BC). Marbled Murrelets are listed as “Threatened” in Canada, “red-listed” in BC, and designated as an “identified species” under the BC Forest and Range Practices Act. In collaboration with researchers at UBC, the BC Ministry of Forests, and the B.C. Marbled Murrelet Recovery Team, Cortex developed a regional demographic model for Marbled Murrelets that was used to assess policy options for regional habitat protection, helping to minimize risk of species loss in the six Marbled Murrelet Conservation Regions identified in British Columbia.
Projects
Marbled Murrelet Monitoring
- Ecological Analysis
- Other
Project Number
80.002
Project Leader
Glenn Sutherland
Client Code
80
Client
UBC
Interests
Government, Industry, NGO, Academic
Duration
2003–2004
Type
Biodiversity Mgmt
Region
Coastal BC
Outcomes
- focused research attention on the contributions of non-forest habitat (e.g., marine food webs) to population fluctuations and persistence probability
- published methodologies and results in an extension note and a technical report
- issued a peer-reviewed research paper
Carbon Management
0
Ecological Analysis
80
Other
20