Forest health monitoring at Isle Royale National Park: 2019 field season

Sanders, Suzanne; Kirschbaum, Jessica

doi:10.36967/2294732

Cited by 1 publication

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“…Our initial sampling period, 2010, followed a six‐year period of low moose abundance, with estimates of 385–650 individuals from 2005 to 2011 (Vucetich & Peterson, 2010). Indeed, in our 2010 sampling event, we detected very little moose browse on woody species (Sanders & Grochowski, 2012). Coincident with our two sampling events, wolf abundance was undergoing a long‐term decline, eventually reaching two individuals from 2016 to 2018; the result of this was a moose irruption, reaching more than 2000 individuals at the time of our 2019 sampling (Hoy et al, 2020).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 85%

Woody species response to altered herbivore pressure at Isle Royale National Park

Sanders

Kirschbaum

2023

Ecosphere

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Herbivores shape vegetative communities via numerous mechanisms, including browse. We used vegetation monitoring data from Isle Royale National Park to examine woody species change across a nine-year interval, coinciding with herbivore escalation. Here, moose and snowshoe hare are the dominant herbivores, while the gray wolf is the apex predator. Our initial sampling period (2010) followed six years of low moose abundance, while our second sampling event (2019) followed a nine-year escalation in moose density. We tested for change in both saplings and shrubs and compared diameter size distributions of common tree species in three island sections. We found a decline in large saplings of sugar maple, a species limited to the west section of the island. We also saw declines in small saplings of sugar maple, paper birch, and trembling aspen. For some species, including black spruce and white spruce, taxa that are unpalatable to moose, diameter distributions were proportionally larger (i.e., indicative of fewer small individuals) in 2019 than in 2010. In contrast, diameter distributions of

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 85%