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So on the hardwood ecosystem experiment I'm studying the response of migratory
birds to different timber harvest treatments.
And that's important because research has shown that across the United States
migratory birds are declining.
And species that depend on shrubby,
young forest habitat are declining to an even greater degree.
And so we're interested in how different timber harvesting treatments can create
habitat for migratory birds.
We've been monitoring populations of migratory birds for the past ten years.
And that's involved more than 4,000 individual surveys and
nearly 50,000 detections of individual birds of 65 different species.
So, one of the ways that we can assess the bird community at these sites is to look
at the species richness which is the number of species that are present.
And what we found was that relative to the control sites the even age and
uneven age management units had about 20% greater species richness.
So, prior to the Timber Harvest being applied at the Higher Eco Experiment,
we saw that bird communities were quite similar between the treatments.
After we applied the harvest, we had some interesting findings including the fact
that 19 different species increased following the timber harvests.
And that included species of conservation concern in Indiana like this
cerulean warbler, the black-and-white warbler and hooded warbler.
We also saw an increase in richness at those harvest sites of nearly 30%.
Additionally, we did see declines in some mature forest species following harvest
including the warmening warbler and the oven bird.
So what we're finding is that in order to maintain a diversity of
birds in the landscape, we need a corresponding diversity of habitat types.
And right now in Indiana we have a lot of mature forests, but
what we don't have as much of is that early successional, young forest,
shrubby types of habitat that support a unique set of species.
And one way to create that early successional habitat is through
timber harvesting.
>> Our research is designed to study the responses of bats to forest management.
And we work on two state forests, the Yellowwood State Forest and
the Morgan-Monroe State Forest in South Central Indiana.
And we're studying two species of bats.
The northern long-eared bat, which is newly listed as federally threatened, and
the Indiana bat which is a federally endangered species.
We have a general understanding of how bats respond to forest management in that
we know without forests the bats will not have sufficient roosting habitat.
Also bats depend on forests for foraging habitat.
So we know that we need intact forests but
we don't know what age the forest needs to be, what the basal area,
how many trees per acre there needs to be, what size the trees need to be.
We don't have a great understanding of that for
the bats that are really imperiled.
There's been more work in fragmented wood lots, that are riparian wood lots along
streams here in Indiana then there has been in these more intact,
contiguous forests like the state forests in south central Indiana.
And so we are studying the responses of these
two species that dwell in forests in the summer to the different
treatments that are being implemented in the Hardwood Ecosystem Experiment.
So how do these bats respond to hatch cuts,
shelter wood cuts, clear cuts, single tree selection.
The different practices that are being used on the state forests.
And we're studying their responses in a number of ways.
So one is just looking at the distribution of the bats across the state forests.
So we're doing capture surveys in a number of areas a cross the forest to figure out
what the bat community looks like and what the relevant abundance is for
these two target species.
We're also putting radio tags on the two bats, the Indiana bat and
the northern long eared bat, tracking them to their roost trees and
then doing forging telemetry, which involves going out at night and
measuring where the bats are on the landscape.
So actually following the bats as they fly around the landscape to understand
how they're using the landscape.
And so with these different pieces of information, we'll be able to piece
together a better understand of the foraging ecology of both the Indiana bat
and the northern long-eared bat on these state forests and these managed forests.
>> Yeah, so our work in the managed forest,
looking at how the bats respond to the timber harvesting so far we're seeing that
it doesn't seem to have a negative effect see they're neutral or even positive.
They definitely seem to take advantage of this small patch cuts that are replicated
across the landscape.
So when you have many of these small openings that are implemented in
different years, the bats have several options that they can fly to
these different patches and look for different types of food.
>> So in addition to the roost trees that these bats require and
small forest openings, Indiana bats and northern long-eared
bats need a permanent or stable source of water during the summer.
And then they also use corridors during the forest so for
both of these species we capture them routinely over these small half acre
forest ponds on the Hardwood Ecosystem Project.
And these bats are likely coming to these ponds to get a drink of water to fuel
their lactation process and
also to recover after hours spent on the wing foraging.
We also see bats flying down stream corridors and along ridge top
corridors which may be roads, and it's likely that they're using these as
commuting corridors to get from one place to another in the forest very quickly.
So, these linear openings are really important,
as well as the nonlinear openings represented by the small patch cuts.
>> The serene warbler is one of the most rapidly declining
migratory songbirds in North America.
We know that serene warblers breed and mature forests and
oftentimes these forests are associated with these canopy gaps.
So my graduate students and
I were interested in finding out why this species is declining.
What it's habitat needs are and
if it is reproducing successfully in Indiana state forests.
Banding has been very challenging.
This is the fifth year that we've started to band.
We started about four years ago and this is our fifth field season.
But this year has been especially challenging,
because we have setup mist nets in our usual locations,
which our close to the ground, and we have not had any success until recently.
We decided to try a different capture technique, and that was to setup a canopy
mist net and so far we've been very successful in capturing birds.
Well one of the really interesting findings that we found is that this
particular species does respond to timber harvest,
in other words it responds positively.
So what we've noted is that we found several nests they have actually
been constructed relatively close to these openings that have been created
in the forest canopy.
Another really important factor that we've found out is that
oaks, especially white oaks and hickories are very
important tree species for this particular migratory songbird.
We found that males will use oaks and hickories as song perch trees and
these are usually some of the taller trees in the canopy.
And females predominantly use oaks and hickories to construct their nests.
They will also remove nesting material from grapevines
that often will grow along these trees, and we found that both males and
females will forage for caterpillars to feed their young.
And the species that produce a lot of caterpillars are oaks and hickories.
A third component that we've found is that some of the birds actually do come back
that have been banded, and this is an indication that these birds have been
successful in previous years and we documented that they've been successful.
And these are primarily males but we were really
excited last year when we had a female that was banded three years ago and
she actually came back to almost the same location for three consecutive years.
And each year she was successful in raising young.
Active forest management that promotes the regeneration of oaks
specifically white oaks but also other species of oaks and hickories and
in the process creates small openings that serene warblers are attracted to
will benefit the species in the long run.
So the key to cerulean warbler conservation is to create
a suite of characteristics that the species uses for
its nesting, and also for its singing on its breeding grounds.
>> The woodland Salamanders that I study are very small and they're lung-less.
Which means they require moist environments so
that they can breathe through their skin.
It's not commonly known, but
salamanders often times outnumber all other vertebrates in a forest ecosystem.
This means that they're incredibly important for
food webs in terms of finding food for other predators but
also in controlling micro invertebrate prey in the forest floor.
So anything that we do in terms of forest management that might
affect the relative abundance, good have a trophic cascade or
a cascading effect on wildlife in the forest ecosystem.
So in order to understand or response of woodland salamanders to timber harvest,
read utilize what are called artificial cover objects,
which are simply a wooden two by 12 cut into one foot sections and
placed throughout the forest environment in grids.
So in total, we had over 3,000 artificial cover objects throughout the landscape.
We had these and areas that were in uncut areas or are controls
as well as our areas that were isolated for both types of harvest treatments.
And we collected two seasons of data,
pre-harvest as well as five seasons a data post-harvest again to study their
immediate effects on the effect on the effects of timber harvest
on the relative abundance of woodland salamanders.
We checked our cover boards every two weeks for
two months in the spring and two months in the fall for each of those seven seasons.
So over the seven sampling seasons we captured nearly 20,000 salamanders.
And from this data, really two general trends emerged.
First is the harvest treatments that left the canopy intact,
had no decline since salamander abundance.
Whereas those that did remove the canopy
did have moderate declines in salamander numbers, at least at the local scale.
We also measured the edge effect of these clear cuts into the adjacent forest land,
and what we found is that those clear cuts only effected salamander
abundance about 20 meters into the adjacent forest.
So at the landscape scale,
these small canopy openings really didn't have any effect on salamander abundance.
So, what this means in terms of managing forests for
woodland salamanders is all the effects that we saw were at the very local scale.
We found no indication of impacts at the broader, more landscape level.
So, if you think about the harvest openings used on
the Hardwood Ecosystem Experiment,
those small openings are probably compatible with maintaining local
salamander populations in a contiguous forested landscape.
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