Of Mice and Moose: Impacts of Forest Harvest Practices on Mammal Communities

Of Mice and Moose: Impacts of Forest Harvest Practices on Mammal Communities

This project focuses on the wildlife that use and frequent a gradient of forest harvesting methods in the Interior of BC. The experimental design involves three replicates of five forest harvesting treatments at three sites: Jaffray (Kootenays), Alex Fraser Research Forest (Cariboo) and John Prince Research Forest (Nechako). The treatments are: clearcut (100% canopy removal), 60% retention (canopy removal in strips across the block), 30% retention (remaining forest in intact patches with understory), seed tree (small proportion of largest Douglas firs left behind) and uncut forest (100% intact, natural canopy). One camera trap is deployed per treatment plot at each site to monitor medium- to large-sized mammals and a grid of cameras has also been set up in each treatment to investigate small mammals at John Prince Research Forest. Small mammals were simultaneously live trapped to examine the validity of the two methods. The goals are to determine the effects of each harvesting treatment on the mammal community as a whole, particularly focusing on diversity of mammals in each treatment across the climate gradient.