We examined impacts of grazing and weather on lesser prairie-chicken abundance, survival, and recruitment while simultaneously accounting for imperfect detection from 2004-2014 in shinnery oak prairies of New Mexico. We used maximum number of males per lek as the response variable and used number of graze days/ha per pasture, rainfall, annual maximum daily temperature (AMT), and number of days with maximum temperature > 90th percentile (MAX90) as site-level covariates. We modeled effects of weather parameters on survival and recruitment from the same year of sampling and up to three years before to account for potential time lags in population response. Grazing did not affect abundance. Weather parameters did not directly influence survival. Effects of AMT varied by time lag, but typically negatively affected recruitment and appeared to have a greater impact than rainfall or MAX90. Results suggest that abudance is not affected by grazing up to 0.023 days/ha per year. Weather appears to affect reproduction efforts more greatly than adult male survival during lekking.
Oral presentation and poster titles, abstracts, and authors from the Society for Range Management (SRM) Annual Meetings and Tradeshows, from 2013 forward.