Kerri T. Vierling

University of Idaho | UID · Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources

Continuous characterizations of forest structure are critical for modeling wildlife habitat as well as for assessing trade-offs with additional ecosystem services. To overcome the spatial and temporal limitations of airborne lidar data for studying wide-ranging animals and for monitoring wildlife habitat through time, novel sampling data sources, i...

Standing dead trees (known as snags) are historically difficult to map and model using airborne laser scanning (ALS), or lidar. Specific snag characteristics are important for wildlife; for instance, a larger snag with a broken top can serve as a nesting platform for raptors. The objective of this study was to evaluate whether characteristics such...

Airborne lidar is often used to calculate forest metrics about trees, but it may also provide a wealth of information about the space between trees. Forest canopy gaps are defined by the absence of vegetative structure and serve important roles for wildlife, such as facilitating animal movement. Forest canopy gaps also occur around snags, keystone...

Key message Drivers of the abundance and richness of tree-related microhabitats are similar in mountain forests of Europe and North America and their occurrence may be explained by tree functional groups. Abstract A common approach to support forest-dwelling species in managed forests is to preserve valuable habitat trees. To assess the quality of...

Abstract A better understanding of seed movement in plant community dynamics is needed, especially in light of disturbance‐driven changes and investments into restoring degraded plant communities. A primary agent of change within the sagebrush‐steppe is wildfire and invasion by non‐native forbs and grasses, primarily cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum). O...

Drone use in wildlife biology has greatly increased as they become cheaper and easier to deploy in the field. In this paper we describe a less invasive method of using drones and exploring their limitations for studying colonial nesting waterbirds. Western Grebes, like most colonial nesting waterbirds, can be very sensitive to human interaction. Us...

The structure and composition of forest ecosystems are expected to shift with climate‐induced changes in precipitation, temperature, fire, carbon mitigation strategies, and biological disturbance. These factors are likely to have biodiversity implications. However, climate‐driven forest ecosystem models used to predict changes to forest structure a...

Summer temperature patterns within tree cavities might influence occupancy of cavities by different animals such as birds and bats, and furthermore, cavity temperatures can influence processes such as embryonic development or the development of young. Our study aimed to identify the environmental variables influencing cavity temperatures during sum...

Remote sensing technologies are increasingly able to measure environmental characteristics important for wildlife, but remain limited in measuring small‐scale structures like tree cavities. Tree cavities are essential structures in many systems, including use for breeding and roosting by multiple animal species that vary in size. However, obtaining...

Many bird species have different habitat needs across their life cycles, and it is therefore important to consider management at broad spatial extents ranging from ecosystems to landscapes. For instance, a Neotropical migrant that breeds in North America might select a reproductive territory that provides nesting habitat with suitable cover and for...

Significance Decades of research have fostered the now-prevalent assumption that noncrop habitat facilitates better pest suppression by providing shelter and food resources to the predators and parasitoids of crop pests. Based on our analysis of the largest pest-control database of its kind, noncrop habitat surrounding farm fields does affect multi...

Conserving multiple facets of biodiversity is important for sustaining ecosystems. However, understanding relationships between faunal diversity and measurable ecosystem quantities, such as heterogeneity and productivity, across continental scales can be complicated by disparate methods. We developed standardized approaches using lidar data and spe...

La conversión de las áreas de bosque a áreas de producción agropecuaria continua siendo una de las principales amenazas para la conservación de la biodiversidad. Diferentes estudios han demostrado que los sistemas agroforestales son una alternativa viable para establecer un balance entre la producción de alimentos y la conservación de la biodiversi...

Tree cavities provide critical roosting and breeding sites for multiple species, and thermal environments in these cavities are important to understand. Our objectives were to (1) describe thermal characteristics in cavities between June 3 and August 9, 2014, and (2) investigate the environmental factors that influence cavity temperatures. We place...

Ecologists have a long-term interest in understanding the relative influence of vegetation composition and vegetation structure on avian diversity. LiDAR remote sensing is useful in studying local patterns of avian diversity because it characterizes fine-scale vegetation structure across broad extents. We used LiDAR, aerial and satellite imagery, a...

Capturing and quantifying the world in three dimensions (x,y,z) using light detection and ranging (lidar) technology drives fundamental advances in the Earth and Ecological Sciences (EES). However, additional lidar dimensions offer the possibility to transcend basic 3-D mapping capabilities, including i) the physical time (t) dimension from repeat...

Understanding how species functional traits relate to the delivery of ecosystem services is essential to support on-going biodiversity conservation efforts. While much recent work has been conducted, relatively few studies relating functional ecology to ecosystem services has utilized field experiments, particularly for animal species. We used a fu...

The effects of climate change are more acute in the Arctic than any other region, and as such, arctic tundra wildlife habitats are changing in ways that are not yet well understood. Remote sensing tools are capable of assessing dynamics in wildlife-habitat associations over a wide range of spatial scales and in a variety of ecosystems. As already w...

According to the U.S. National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA), federal action to manipulate habitat for species conservation requires an environmental impact statement, which should integrate natural, physical, economic, and social sciences in planning and decision making. Nonetheless, most impact assessments focus disproportionately on ph...

Invasions by non-native plants can alter ecosystems such that new ecological states are reached, but less is known about how these transitions influence animal populations. Sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) ecosystems are experiencing state changes because of fire and invasion by exotic annual grasses. Our goal was to study the effects of these stat...

Sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) ecosystems are declining due to biological invasions and changes in fire regimes. Understanding how ecosystem changes influence functionally important animals such as ecosystem engineers is essential to conserve ecological functions. American badgers (Taxidea tax-us) are an apex predator and ecosystem engineer in th...

Harvester ants are influential in many ecosystems because they distribute and consume seeds, remove vegetation, and redistribute soil particles and nutrients. Understanding the interaction between harvester ants and plant communities is important for management and restoration efforts, particularly in systems altered by fire and invasive species su...

White-headed woodpeckers (Picoides albolarvatus) are important cavity excavators that recently have become the focus of much research because of concerns over population declines. Past studies have focused on nest site selection and survival but information is needed on factors influencing their space use when away from the nest. We examined space...

Red-naped sapsuckers (Sphyrapicus nuchalis) are functionally important because they create sapwells and cavities that other species use for food and nesting. Red-naped sapsucker ecology within aspen (Populus tremuloides) has been well studied, but relatively little is known about red-naped sapsuckers in conifer forests. We used light detection and...

Aim Bat mortality rates from white‐nose syndrome and wind power development are unprecedented. Cryptic and wide‐ranging behaviours of bats make them difficult to survey, and population estimation is often intractable. We advance a model‐based framework for making spatially explicit predictions about summertime distributions of bats from capture and...

We describe a first step framework for climate change species' impact assessments that produces spatially and temporally heterogeneous models of climate impacts. Case study results are provided for great gray owl (Strix nebulosa) in Idaho as an example of framework application. This framework applies species-specific sensitivity weights to spatial...

Climate change is well documented at the global scale, but local and regional changes are not as well understood. Finer, local- to regional-scale information is needed for creating specific, place-based planning and adaption efforts. Here the development of an indicator-focused climate change assessment in Idaho is described. This interdisciplinary...

Woodpeckers and other primary cavity excavators (PCEs) are important worldwide for excavating cavities in trees, and a large number of studies have examined their nesting preferences. However, quantitative measures of wood hardness have been omitted from most studies, and ecologists have focused on the effects of external tree- and habitat-level fe...

The U.S. Geological Survey's Gap Analysis Program (hereafter GAP) is a nationally-based program that uses land cover, vertebrate distributions, and land ownership to identify locations where gaps in conservation coverage exist, and GAP products are commonly used by government agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and private citizens. The GAP la...

The need for wildlife climate change vulnerability and sensitivity assessments has increased over the past decade. Use of these assessments by wildlife and land managers has increased due to concern for potential effects of climate change on species and landscapes. Although many approaches exist for assessing sensitivity and vulnerability to climat...

Characterizing landscapes as gradients may help illuminate animal–habitat relationships that are either 1) masked by or 2) impractical to investigate using a purely patch-based perspective. Among other methods, variogram models may reveal these gradients in the environment by quantifying spatial dependence among point samples, yet few analyses of a...

Vegetation structure quantified by light detection and ranging (LiDAR) can improve understanding of wildlife occupancy and species-richness patterns. However, there is often a time lag between the collection of LiDAR data and wildlife data. We investigated whether a time lag between the LiDAR acquisition and field-data acquisition affected mapped w...

Estimating biodiversity in complex habitats, particularly in forests, is still a major challenge for ecologists and conservationists. In ground-breaking work, Robert MacArthur and his colleagues quantified relationships between bird and vertical vegetation diversity, and found that the diversity of vegetation structure strongly influenced bird spec...

Incorporating vertical vegetation structure into models of animal distributions can improve understanding of the patterns and processes governing habitat selection. LiDAR can provide such structural information, but these data are typically collected via aircraft and thus are limited in spatial extent. Our objective was to explore the utility of sa...

In western conifer-dominated forests where the abundance of old-growth stands is decreasing, species such as the Brown Creeper (Certhia americana) may be useful as indicator species for monitoring the health of old-growth systems because they are strongly associated with habitat characteristics associated with old growth and are especially sensitiv...

Background/Question/Methods Bats exhibit “slow” life history strategies, with inherently low rates of extrinsic mortality and fecundity, and high longevity. These traits should result in low annual turnover in the regional occurrence patterns of bats, particularly in temperate regions where species exhibit the “slowest” life histories. We expect...

Aquatic organisms respond to the physical environmental across a range of spatial scales, but the precise nature of these relationships is often unclear. In order to forecast ecosystem responses to environmental alterations in watersheds, understanding how processes at different spatial scales affect the ecology of organisms is critical. We used th...

Bats face unprecedented threats from habitat loss, climate change, disease, and wind power development, and populations of many species are in decline. A better ability to quantify bat population status and trend is urgently needed in order to develop effective conservation strategies. We used a Bayesian autoregressive approach to develop dynamic d...

Within the United States (U.S.), state wildlife agencies are required to identify Species of Greatest Conservation Need (SGCN), the factors that impact these species, and the conservation actions needed to conserve these species through documentation of a Comprehensive Wildlife Conservation Strategy (CWCS). While the identification of SGCN represen...

Within the United States (U.S.), state wildlife agencies are required to identify Species of Greatest Conservation Need (SGCN), the factors that impact these species, and the conservation actions needed to conserve these species through documentation of a Comprehensive Wildlife Conservation Strategy (CWCS). While the identification of SGCN represen...

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Monitoring programs that evaluate restoration and inform adaptive management are important for addressing environmental degradation. These efforts may be well served by spatially explicit hierarchical approaches to modeling because of unavoidable spatial structure inherited from past land use patterns and other factors. We developed bayesian hierar...

Background/Question/Methods Systematically characterizing biodiversity across broad scales can be challenging due to difficulties in observing, mapping, and validating the presence of species individuals and communities. Understanding species interactions therefore can facilitate biodiversity assessments. Woodpeckers are considered a keystone gui...

Acoustic surveys are widely used for describing bat occurrence and activity patterns and are increasingly important for addressing concerns for habitat management, wind energy, and disease on bat populations. Designing these surveys presents unique challenges, particularly when a probabilistic sample is required for drawing inference to unsampled a...

LiDAR remote sensing has been used to examine relationships between vertebrate diversity and environmental characteristics, but its application to invertebrates has been limited. Our objectives were to determine whether LiDAR-derived variables could be used to accurately describe single-species distributions and community characteristics of spiders...

ABSTRACT  Large wildfires are common in many western coniferous forests, and these fires can affect woodpecker reproduction and habitat use. Our objectives were to examine nesting densities, reproductive parameters, and species-specific habitat selection of woodpeckers in a recently burned region of the Black Hills in South Dakota, USA, between 200...

Biodiversity assessments are increasingly important components of effective ecosystem management plans. Woodpeckers are considered a keystone species whose presence has been shown to be indicative of overall forest bird diversity at the landscape scale. This relationship likely exists because woodpeckers can provide nesting and foraging resources f...

Background/Question/Methods Aquatic organisms respond to the physical environmental across a range of spatial scales. Determining the direct and indirect impacts of environmental factors on aquatic biota poses a significant challenge in understanding habitat quality and in forecasting ecosystem responses to environmental alterations in watersheds...

While there is growing awareness in ecology of spatial dependency, the application in avian ecology of spatially explicit statistical methods is rare in areas such as habitat–reproduction relationships. We compared nonspatial vs. spatially explicit tests of correlation between a measure of reproduction and a habitat attribute associated with Northe...

Nonideal habitat selection occurs when preferred habitat attributes differ from those associated with increased fitness. These mismatches have been widely studied in open cup-nesting birds, but the relationship between habitat-associated preferences and fitness in cavity-nesting birds has received relatively little attention. We studied patterns of...

Numerous variables operating across different spatial scales are known to affect stream ecosystems. However, the relative influence of these variables on stream- riparian biota, as well as the relationships among these predictors, present unique challenges to our current understanding of both structural and functional components of stream networks....

Remote sensing provides critical information for broad scale assessments of wildlife habitat distribution and conservation. However, such efforts have been typically unable to incorporate information about vegetation structure, a variable important for explaining the distribution of many wildlife species. We evaluated the consequences of incorporat...

The lack of maps depicting forest three-dimensional structure, particularly as pertaining to snags and understory shrub species distribution, is a major limitation for managing wildlife habitat in forests. Developing new techniques to remotely map snags and understory shrubs is therefore an important need. To address this, we first evaluated the us...

We researched the environmental attributes (n = 28) associated with elk (n = 50) summer range (1 May–30 Sep) in the central Black Hills of South Dakota, USA, during 1998–2001. We defined high-use areas or centers of activity as landscapes underlying large concentrations of elk locations resulting from the shared fidelity of independently moving ani...

Background/Question/Methods The lack of maps depicting three-dimensional forest structure, particularly as pertaining to snags and understory shrub distribution, can be a major limitation for managing wildlife habitat in forests. Developing new techniques to map snags and understory shrubs using remote sensing data is therefore an important need....

Stream-riparian ecosystems are dynamic and complex entities that can support high levels of bird assemblage abundance and diversity. The myriad patches (e.g., aquatic, floodplain, riparian) found in the riverscape habitat mosaic attract a unique mixture of aquatic, semiaquatic, riparian, and upland birds, each uniquely utilizing the river corridor....

Lewis's (Melanerpes lewis) and Red-headed Woodpecker (Melanerpes erythrocephalus) breeding ranges overlap slightly, but co-occurrence within habitats is thought to be rare because of niche similarity. Our objectives were to examine factors that allowed for co-existence in two burned pine (Pinus ponderosa) forests in the Black Hills, South Dakota. W...

I monitored 382 red-winged blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus) nests in natural (wetlands and tallgrass prairie) and human-disturbed (hayfields, roadside ditches) habitats in the vicinity of Boulder, Colorado during 1996 and 1997. I counted blackbirds in a total of 6216 ha and quantified habitat composition to determine both within-habitat population d...

Spatial data about the distribution of snags and understory shrubs is a major need for managing wildlife habitat in forests. We are evaluating the use of discrete return LiDAR data for predicting the distribution (presence/absence) of understory shrubs and different classes (i.e. diameters) of snags, in a managed, mixed-conifer forest in Northern I...

Vegetation structure is an important factor that influences wildlife-habitat selection, reproduction, and survival. However, field-based measurements of vegetation structure can be time consuming, costly, and difficult to undertake in areas that are remote and/or contain rough terrain. Light detection and ranging (lidar) is an active remote sensing...