image: Elizabeth Hunter studies endangered species on federal land.
Credit: Photo courtesy of Elizabeth Hunter.
Across military installations that often include vast restricted-access acreage of natural landscape, protecting endangered species has become an increasingly complex task as multiple recovery plans stack up on the same habitats.
A pair of $2 million grants was awarded to projects in Virginia Tech’s College of Natural Resources and Environment, to support research to improve how military lands are managed for threatened and endangered species by looking at ways to manage the entire ecosystem, rather than devise a specific plan for each species.
Results from this research can be used to create methodology for endangered species protection and management in other ecosystems where multiple plans have been stacked, reducing redundancies and expanding effectiveness.
Associate Professor Haldre Rogers and Assistant Professor Elizabeth Hunter, both in the Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation, each lead a project that addresses a common challenge across military installations: how to manage landscapes that support dozens of protected species without relying on separate, species-by-species plans that can become costly, complex, occasionally contradictory, and difficult to scale.
The federal Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program funds the research.
Rethinking single-species management
Hunter, who works for the U.S. Geological Survey in the Virginia Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, is working on a project that focuses on multi-species wildlife management in fire-managed ecosystems, where prescribed burning is the primary land management tool. Historically, she said, prescribed fire regimes have often been designed around a small number of focal species.
“In the past, it’s really been a focus on a couple of key species, like red-cockaded woodpeckers,” Hunter said. “But that leaves out all of the other hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other species that need slightly different management regimes in terms of the frequencies, severity, and placement of where prescribed burning is done.”
Working in southeastern Georgia, home to large military installations, Hunter’s team will use a suite of monitoring technologies to track a wide range of species.
“We are going to be using several different technological techniques to monitor birds, bats, amphibians, reptiles, small mammals, insects, pollinators — every species that we can, every animal species,” she said.
The data will be integrated into a multi-objective optimization tool that evaluates how different prescribed fire strategies affect multiple species simultaneously.
“Then we put it all together to figure out, ‘If we burn in this way, in this area, can we improve the outlook for many species at the same time?’” Hunter said.
The project includes collaborators from Virginia Tech, the Orianne Society, and the National Council for Air and Stream Improvement, a nonprofit forestry research organization.
Managing ecosystems
Rogers’ project tackles a similar problem from a different angle, focusing on how endangered species are managed under the Endangered Species Act. Military installations often host large numbers of listed species in overlapping habitats, each with its own recovery plan.
“You might have 20 different plans all overlapping in the same place,” Rogers said. “You have to do 20 different management actions and 20 different monitoring surveys – as more species get listed, this approach breaks down.”
“So the question is: is there a way of managing and monitoring the whole ecosystem and using proxies for the listed species to make sure they persist.”
The research aims to answer that question by testing whether habitat-based, ecosystem-level management can reduce overlapping requirements while still meeting conservation goals for multiple protected species at once.
Her project, based in the Marianas Islands, compares traditional single-species management approaches with a habitat-based strategy that treats the ecosystem as an interconnected whole. The team will use ecosystem hypergraphs, a modeling approach that captures species interactions, habitat connectivity, and life histories, to identify groups of species that could be managed together.
“The idea is to figure out which groups of species could benefit from similar management actions and make sure that an action that helps one species isn’t actually hurting another,” she said.
Trade-offs are inevitable, Rogers said, but understanding them across an entire landscape could allow land managers to make more informed, efficient decisions.
Military lands are among the most ecologically significant landscapes in the United States, in part because activities like prescribed fire and restricted public access have preserved habitat that has disappeared elsewhere. At the same time, installations must balance conservation obligations with training and operational needs.
Rogers said strategies developed by the researchers can create a new methodology for species management that will be extended to management plans in other environments.
Rogers’ project includes Virginia Tech Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow Claudia Nuñez-Penichet and Postdoctoral Researcher Joåo Vitor Messeder and Michael Schwob from the Department of Statistics, as well as collaborators from Rice University, Brown University, and MIT.