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Doug Bruggeman

Pattern oriented modeling to inform habitat trading decisions for rare and threatened vertebrate species.

Dougs research concerns the use of Pattern Oriented Modeling to inform habitat trading decisions for rare and threatened vertebrate species. Despite uncertainty regarding biological processes that allow species to persist in fragmented landscape such as dispersal, there are often strong economic drivers to change habitat allocations. We will be evaluating the benefits of including both demographic and genetic data to reduce uncertainty. Then we will be apply multiple models to evaluate the conservation value of habitat patches using Landscape Equivalency Analysis, which is a generally applicable landscape scale account tool that incorporates the effects of habitat fragmentation into the value of tradable credits. Our work this year will focus on the red-cockaded woodpecker. We are evaluating patterns across a 1 million hectare landscape in coast North Carolina. Next year we will be working on a model for the gopher tortoise.

Incorporating the influences of landscape structure and uncertainty when trading endangered species habitat

His recent work involves approaches for trading patches within metapopulations. Such a biodiversity credit system for trading endangered species habitat may be designed to minimize and reverse the negative effects of habitat loss and fragmentation. Given the increasing demand for land, approaches that explicitly balance economic goals against conservation goals are required. Conservation banking under the Endangered Species Act has been used to mediate these conflicts based on the cost to replace habitat.  So far replacement costs have ignored the landscape context of patches traded, thus patch trading may exacerbate the effects of habitat fragmentation.

Clearly, one of the crucial elements of this approach is to determine the value of patches for a metapopulation; thus reducing model uncertainty. This is why Doug is here; he wants to apply pattern-oriented modelling to reduce model uncertainty and combine it with uncertainty analysis. The idea is to apply the pattern-oriented modeling approach to population genetic and demographic data for the Red-Cockaded Woodpecker.  Patterns of genetic markers may be an effective "filter" for reducing parameter uncertainty in SEPMs.  Tradeoffs between patch area and connectivity are an inevitable consequence of tradable permit systems for endangered species habitat. Pattern-oriented modeling and population genetic theory will provide a more rigorous means for assessing the risks and uncertainties associated with such policies.