![]() ![]() Vital rates are also influenced by a population's evolutionary history (Koons, Pavard, Baudisch, & Metcalf, 2009 Stearns, 1992). Vital rates, like survival, may be affected by environmental conditions (Amundson & Arnold, 2011 Aubry et al., 2013), anthropogenic factors (Arnold & Zink, 2011 Loss, Will, & Marra, 2012), and demographic stochasticity (Lande, 1993). The difference between the number of entries (births and immigration) into and exits (deaths and emigration) from a population over determines temporal change in abundance (Pradel, 1996 Williams, Nichols, & Conroy, 2002). Finally, our results continue to add to the importance of experimentation in applied conservation biology, where we believe that continued experiments on nonthreatened species will be critically important as researchers attempt to understand how to quantify and mitigate direct anthropogenic impacts in a changing world.Ī fundamental goal of applied ecology is to understand the mechanisms governing the dynamics of populations. We demonstrate the utility of capture–mark–recapture methods to estimate abundance of species which are difficult to survey and test the impacts of anthropogenic harvest and climate on populations. We suggest efforts to conserve waterfowl should focus on the effects of habitat loss in breeding areas and climate change, which will likely affect precipitation regimes in the future. In contrast, harvest regulations and harvest rates did not affect population growth rates. Climatic conditions influencing water availability were strongly positively related to population growth rates of wood ducks in our study system. We then assessed the effect of one environmental variable and harvest pressure on annual changes in the breeding population size. We used 9 years of capture–mark–recapture data to estimate breeding population size during the spring for a population of wood ducks in Nevada. ![]() The goal of our study was to decouple harvest and environmental variability in a closely monitored population of wild ducks in North America, where we experimentally regulated harvest independently of environmental variation over a period of 4 years. Further, many population managers strictly manage harvest of wild organisms to mediate population trends of these populations. ![]() Habitat destruction and climate change threaten the future of many wildlife populations, and there are additional concerns regarding the effects of harvest rates on demographic components of harvested organisms. Population change is regulated by vital rates that are influenced by environmental conditions, demographic stochasticity, and, increasingly, anthropogenic effects. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |