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Best Management Practices for Golden-winged Warbler Habitat in Forest and Shrub Wetlands of the Appalachians
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This is a supplemental document that provides information on managing forest and shrub wetlands in the Appalachians to develop and restore habitat for Golden-winged Warblers. This guide should be used in conjunction with the Best Management Practices for Golden-winged Warbler Habitats in the Appalachian Region, which includes general information that applies to all habitat types in the Appalachian region.
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Information Materials
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Fact Sheets
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Golden-Winged Warbler Appalachians Fact Sheets
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Impacts of mountaintop mining on terrestrial ecosystem integrity: identifying landscape thresholds for avian species in the central Appalachians, United States
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Reclaimed mine-dominated landscapes (less forest and more grassland/shrubland cover) elicited more negative (57 %) than positive (39 %) species responses. Negative thresholds for each landscape metric generally occurred at lower values than positive thresholds, thus negatively responding species were
detrimentally affected before positively responding species benefitted. Forest interior birds generally
responded negatively to landscape metric thresholds, interior edge species responses were mixed, and early
successional birds responded positively. The forest interior guild declined most at 4 % forest loss, while
the shrubland guild increased greatest after 52 % loss
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Resources
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Climate Science Documents
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Sour Streams in Appalachia: Mapping Nature’s Buffer Against Sulfur Deposition
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Sulfur emissions are regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency, but sulfuric acid that has
leached into soil and streams can linger in the environment and harm vegetation and aquatic life. Some
watersheds are better able to buffer streams against acidification than others; scientists learned why in
southern Appalachia.
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Climate Science Documents
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Pedoecological Modeling to Guide Forest Restoration using Ecological Site Descriptions
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the u.s. department of agriculture (usda)-natural resources conservation service (nrcs) uses an ecological site description (esd) framework to help incorporate interactions between local soil, climate, flora, fauna, and humans into schema for land management decision-making. we demonstrate esd and digital soil mapping tools to (i) estimate potential o horizon carbon (c) stock accumulation from restoring alternative ecological states in high-elevation forests of the central appalachian Mountains in west Virginia (wV), usa, and (ii) map areas in alternative ecological states that can be targeted for restoration. this region was extensively disturbed by clear-cut harvests and related fires during the 1880s through 1930s. we combined spodic soil property maps, recently linked to historic red spruce–eastern hemlock (Picea rubens–Tsuga canadensis) forest communities, with current forest inventories to provide guidance for restoration to a historic reference state. this allowed mapping of alternative hardwood states within areas of the spodic shale uplands conifer forest (scF) ecological site, which is mapped along the regional conifer-hardwood transition of the central appalachian Mountains. Plots examined in these areas suggest that many of the spruce-hemlock dominated stands in wV converted to a hardwood state by historic disturbance have lost at least 10 cm of o horizon thickness, and possibly much more. Based on this 10 cm estimate, we calculate that at least 3.74 to 6.62 tg of c were lost from areas above 880 m elevation in wV due to historic disturbance of o horizons, and that much of these stocks and related ecosystem functions could potentially be restored within 100 yr under focused management, but more practical scenarios would likely require closer to 200 yr.
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Climate Science Documents
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Conservation in the face of climate change: The roles of alternative models, monitoring, and adaptation in confronting and reducing uncertainty
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The broad physical and biological principles behind climate change and its potential large scale ecological impacts on biota are fairly well understood, although likely responses of biotic communities at fine spatio-temporal scales are not, limiting the ability of conservation programs to respond effectively to climate change outside the range of human experience. Much of the climate debate has focused on attempts to resolve key uncertainties in a hypothesis-testing framework. However, conservation decisions cannot await resolution of these scientific issues and instead must proceed in the face of uncertainty. We suggest that conservation should precede in an adaptive management framework, in which decisions are guided by predictions under multiple, plausible hypotheses about climate impacts. Under this plan, monitoring is used to evaluate the response of the system to climate drivers, and management actions (perhaps experimental) are used to confront testable predictions with data, in turn providing feedback for future decision making. We illustrate these principles with the problem of mitigating the effects of climate change on terrestrial bird communities in the southern Appalachian Mountains, USA.
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Reports & Documents
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Using a structured decision making process for strategic conservation of imperiled aquatic species in the Upper Tennessee River Basin
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Development of strategic conservation of imperiled species faces several large challenges, including uncertainty in species response to management actions, budgetary constraints that limit options, and issues with scaling expected conservation benefits from local to landscape levels and from single to multiple species. We used a structured decision making process and a multi-scale approach to identify a cost-effective conservation strategy for the imperiled aquatic species in the Upper Tennessee River Basin (UTRB), which face a variety of threats. The UTRB, which encompasses a landscape of 22,360 square miles primarily in Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, harbors one of the most globally diverse assemblages of freshwater fishes and mussels occurring at temperate latitudes. In developing the strategy, we sought to identify which management actions to emphasize to best achieve recovery of imperiled aquatic species, given costs and uncertainty in management effectiveness. The strategy was developed for conservation implementation over a 20-year period, with periodic review and revision. In this presentation, we describe the ecological significance of the UTRB, the planning process, and the resulting strategy. A strategic emphasis on population management emerged as the optimal approach for achieving conservation of imperiled aquatic species in the UTRB, which aligns well with the goals of existing plans for conserving and recovering imperiled fishes and mussels in the UTRB. The structured planning process and resulting conservation strategy dovetail with the landscape approach to conservation embodied in the USFWS’s strategic habitat conservation approach and network of Landscape Conservation Cooperatives.
The recorded webinar is also available for viewing at the following link: http://www.fws.gov/northeast/science/seminars/July2015.html.
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News & Information
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Webinars and Presentations
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Canaan Valley Institute (CVI)
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Canaan Valley Institute (CVI) is driven by a mission to ensure the Appalachian region has healthy streams — a critical economic engine for rural communities. CVI’s approach for clean and healthy rivers creates positive results environmentally AND economically.
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LP Members
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Organizations Search
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Consortium of Appalachian Fire Managers & Scientists
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The Consortium of Appalachian Fire Managers & Scientists (CAFMS) is one of 15 knowledge exchange networks supported by the Joint Fire Science Program. Our goal is to promote communication among fire managers and scientists in the Appalachian Mountains region. CAFMS is largely successful because of a strong relationship between the U.S. Forest Service Southern Research Stations and The Nature Conservancy's Fire Learning Network.
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LP Members
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Organizations Search
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Appalachian Angling Society
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Organizations Search
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Appalachian American Indians of West Virginia (AAIWV )
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Appalachian American Indians of West Virginia, Inc. (AAIWV) is an intertribal tribe of Native Americans and their mixed blood lineal descendants.
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Organizations Search
