Synopsis:
This document details the Milk River Basin project, designed to produce innovative approaches to multi-species management in Southern Alberta. The Milk River basin contains a variety of ‘sensitive’, ‘at risk’, and ‘may be at risk’ species. The process of prioritizing the landscape for conservation and stewardship was driven by species inventories to identify known locations, and Habitat Suitability Index (HSI) models to delimit suitable key habitat for the 17 selected species. The construction of the models was limited to the available variables and resolution of the databases. For MULTISAR: the Milk River Basin Project area this was the quarter section, the resolution of the Native Prairie Vegetation Inventory. Because of the resolution of available databases, the models produced for this project are coarse in nature. Model parameters were chosen as a result of literature review and expert opinion; field validation of model outputs was recommended by the authors.
Conclusions:
Few species were in fact influenced by grassland amount or fragmentation. In contrast, distance to edge and local vegetation characteristics had significant effects on densities and nest success of many species.
Thresholds/Learnings:
