Greater prairie-chickens are a grassland obligate species that have been experiencing range wide declines over the last century. The Flint Hills region of Oklahoma and Kansas has one of the largest remaining population of greater prairie-chickens but the grasslands of this region are threatened with fragmentation from energy development and mismanagement of fire and grazing. Previous research has found that greater prairie-chickens are sensitive to fragmentation from energy development and require a variety of vegetative conditions that may be absent as a result of intensive cattle management practices such as extensive prescribed burns and high stocking rates. However, little information is available about how fragmentation and management influence movement and space use of greater prairie-chickens throughout the annual cycle. Step Selection Functions (SSF) offer an approach to analyzing the relationship between movement and resource use by comparing the characteristics of observed animal movements to unmade available movements. SSFs will be used to analyze how various environmental factors relating to energy development and rangeland management influence the movement patterns of female greater prairie-chickens in the southern Great Plains that were monitored using GPS transmitters over a two-year period. We predict that female greater prairie-chickens will make movements that keep them further from oil development and roads than expected, and that selection for time since fire and grazing will be dependent on the time of year.
Oral presentation and poster titles, abstracts, and authors from the Society for Range Management (SRM) Annual Meetings and Tradeshows, from 2013 forward.