Progress 09/16/19 to 09/15/21
Outputs
Target Audience:The primary objectives of our study are to quantify fisher diet using metabarcoding and quantify the variation in anticoagulant rodenticide (AR) exposure among fisher mortalities in Washington. These aims were formed by the need to better understand the land management strategies that promote the success of reintroduced fishers in Washington. Accordingly, our primary audiences are: (1) managers of forested land in western Washington, whether they are federal, state, or private (e.g., timber companies), (2) federal and state wildlife managers tasked with ensuring the successful establishment of reintroduced fisher populations in Washington, (3) state legislators who may craft new legislation regulating AR use in Washington, as has been recently done in other states such as California, and (4) wildlife researchers who may benefit from our contributions towards advancing metabarcoding techniques. Fishers have been shown to naturally control economically damaging species, such as porcupines, and our study aimed to investigate the ability of fishers to similarly control mountain beavers. This potential ecosystem service provided by fishers may be valuable to timber companies, because mountain beavers are generally considered a forestry "pest" species that damage seedlings and saplings. Timber companies sometimes use ARs to control mountain beavers, which poses a risk of secondary poisoning for fishers if they consume poisoned mountain beavers. The effects of ARs have had limited study in Washington, and our project is providing wildlife and land managers with information on the extent that ARs are entering food webs in remote forests. New AR regulations are being implemented in other states, such as California, and the information from this study may therefore inform amendment of existing AR regulations or development new regulations in Washington. Another aspect of this study was to document the fine-scale movement of fishers through winter snow-tracking, ground-based telemetry, and the collection of scats. The fisher occurrence data collected during telemetry and snow-tracking efforts have been provided to federal land managers (National Park Service and US Forest Service) and offer insights into the foraging behavior and landscape use of fishers public lands. Lastly, we are optimizing our metabarcoding techniques in ways that few prior studies have been able to through the utilization of fisher scats with known diet contents to create a reference for how the proportion of prey DNA reads from metabarcoding outputs can be applied to our quantitative diet summaries. With these optimizations, we are situated to make broad contributions to how metabarcoding techniques are applied in the non-invasive study of forest carnivores. Changes/Problems:The timeline for this project was delayed due to the withdrawal of MSc student Cameron Milne from the program at UW in winter 2020 and time needed to recruit new MSc student (Kayla Dreher), who started in Fall 2020. In addition, Covid-related laboratory closures has delayed genetics labwork. The project is on target to be completed in September 2022. Fisher establishment near the originally delineated study area where mountain beavers are most abundant was limited. Extensive telemetry searches for fishers released in the North Cascades recovery area revealed that the majority of fishers that survived 1-2 years following their release had established approximately 45 miles southeast of the original study area in a portion of the North-Central Cascades. This area had a drier climate, deeper snowpacks, and substantially less private forestry activity. Each of these factors result in lower mountain beaver densities than the northern recovery area. However, this unexpected outcome shouldn't affect our ability to evaluate the relationship between mountain beavers and fishers where their ranges overlap due to our incorporation of a robust scat dataset from the South Cascades recovery area, where the overlap of these species was well recorded. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?MSc Kayla Dreher has nearly completed coursework towards a Masters degree in Environmental and Forestry Sciences. She has gained extensive experience in conducting research through the execution of this project and under the mentorship of advisors Dr. Laura Prugh and Dr. Jason Ransom (NPS). Through this research assistantship, Kayla has led field data collection, coordinated with collaborators and contractors, trained and mentored field and lab assistants, and developed expertise in genetics methods in the University of Washington SEFS Shared Genetics Lab through performing DNA extractions from tissues and scat samples and PCRs on the extraction products. Once all biological samples are processed and datasets are compiled, she will perform the statistical analyses as part of her thesis research. The results will be presented at the North American Conference for Conservation Biology and the Washington Chapter of the Wildlife Society annual meeting. She is expected to defend her thesis in summer 2022. Each thesis chapter will be submitted for peer-reviewed publication. During the winter 2021 field season, field assistant Nathan Redon was provided training and experience in winter fieldwork, such as trailer towing, snowmobile riding, remote camera deployment, snow back-tracking, and biological sample collection. Additionally, two undergraduate researchers received training in the extraction of prey DNA of fisher scats. Two additional undergraduate students were trained in traditional methods of identifying contents in scat through manual sorting. One of these students will be conducting a comparison analysis of the diet results from metabarcoding and traditional scat sorting on a subset of fisher scats as their capstone thesis project, which will be submitted for peer-reviewed publication. In August 2021, the PI and graduate student visited Taal Levi's lab at Oregon State University to discuss and learn about new metabarcoding techniques. The Levi lab has extensive knowledge and experience conducting metabarcoding diet studies, and Dr. Levi gave a presentation and training on fecal metabarcoding methodologies over two days. This critical training informed our decisions of the most appropriate and current protocols to apply to this study. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?Following their release into the Washington Cascades, fishers have established territories throughout a spectrum of land ownerships. We aimed to promote the awareness of restored carnivore communities throughout our study area and the potential effects of ARs in food webs by contacting private landowners, organizations, and important local land managers adjacent to where our study was being conducted. Tall Timber in Leavenworth, WA is an organization that provides year-round youth camps near Lake Wenatchee to promote environmental education and outdoor recreation. We delivered project information and periodic updates while conducting our fieldwork near their facilities. We also corresponded closely with the Chelan-Douglas Land Trust (CDLT), an organization that partners with private landowners and local communities to enhance the stewardship of natural areas throughout the study area. We provided the CDLT with information on the fisher activity on their land throughout the study area and provided them with information on the ecological requirements of fishers. News reports on the discovery of the first fisher reproductive den located in the North Cascades, which was discovered due to the contributions of this project's winter field efforts, were disseminated through statewide and regional media outlets. This gave a higher profile to the continued research carried out by the fisher reintroduction team. The aims of this study were also described in the widely distributed Cascades Fisher Reintroduction Project Progress Report for April 2019 to June 2020. Lastly, the graduate student co-presented on the objectives and significance of this research in 1-hr virtual lectures to the Mount St Helens Institute and the Washington National Parks Fund which reached audiences of over 200 members. Once this research is complete, it will be disseminated further at research conferences, through peer-reviewed publication, and with science communication tools like an NPS fact sheet and an infographic. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?
Nothing Reported
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
The timeline for this project was delayed (see "Changes/Problems" section below). The project is on target to be completed by September 2022. Our data collection phase is complete and we are currently processing and compiling our datasets for analyses. Our accomplishments to date are summarized below. Fieldwork We collected an extensive catalog of biological samples from Washington fishers to analyze for diet contents using DNA metabarcoding and AR exposure testing. During the 2020 and 2021 summer field seasons, a detection dog team was contracted for a combined 26 search days. The search areas were informed by telemetry locations acquired from aerial and ground surveys in the 8 months prior to the searches. From January 2021 to April 2021, Dreher and field assistant Redon conducted telemetry and winter snow tracking of fishers in the North and Central Cascades to collect scats, recover mortalities, and record fine-scale movement data. 22 km of fine-scale movement data was collected, providing insights into the foraging behavior and space use of Cascade fishers. Between detection dog searches, ground telemetry efforts, winter snow tracking, and visual trail searches, we collected 343 fisher scats, and an additional 160 scats of co-occurring carnivores that were encountered opportunistically. We also obtained 175 fisher scats that were collected in the South Cascades reintroduction area by our agency partners (National Park Service and Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife). Anticoagulant Rodenticide (AR) Exposure Liver tissue and/or fur samples were collected from 24 fishers that died in the North and South Cascades reintroduction areas and 16 fishers that died in the Olympic reintroduction area, giving us a sample size of 40 fishers. All liver tissue samples have been analyzed for exposure to 8 different rodenticides for inclusion in our analyses on the relationships between landscape features, proportion of mountain beavers in the diet, and exposure levels of ARs. Methods development for the detection of ARs in fur samples have been completed by our project partners at Liphatech and the National Wildlife Research Center and have been approved for our use in this study. Genetics During Fall 2021, we extracted DNA from over 500 fisher scats and 160 scats of sympatric carnivores for dietary metabarcoding. These samples are undergoing sequencing for the identification of prey DNA within scats. These data will be used to characterize fisher diets by season and by sex. By conducting diet analyses on other carnivore species, we can also detect the partitioning of resources within forest carnivore communities. Through the successful application of metabarcoding methods, we are producing an extensive dataset of Washington fisher diets.
Publications
- Type:
Other
Status:
Published
Year Published:
2021
Citation:
Parsons, M, A Orloff, L Prugh. 2021. Evaluating live trapping and camera-based indices of small mammal density. Canadian Journal of Zoology. https://doi.org/10.1139/cjz-2020-0298
- Type:
Other
Status:
Published
Year Published:
2020
Citation:
Parsons, M, J Lewis, J Pauli, T Chestnut, J Ransom, D Werntz, L Prugh. 2020. Prey of reintroduced fishers and their habitat relationships in the Cascades Range, Washington. Forest Ecology and Management 460: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foreco.2020.117888.
|
Progress 10/01/20 to 09/15/21
Outputs
Target Audience:The primary objectives of our study are to quantify fisher diet using metabarcoding and quantify the variation in anticoagulant rodenticide (AR) exposure among fisher mortalities in Washington. These aims were formed by the need to better understand the land management strategies that promote the success of reintroduced fishers in Washington. Accordingly, our primary audiences are: (1) managers of forested land in western Washington, whether they are federal, state, or private (e.g., timber companies), (2) federal and state wildlife managers tasked with ensuring the successful establishment of reintroduced fisher populations in Washington, (3) state legislators who may craft new legislation regulating AR use in Washington, as has been recently done in other states such as California, and (4) wildlife researchers who may benefit from our contributions towards advancing metabarcoding techniques. Fishers have been shown to naturally control economically damaging species, such as porcupines, and our study aimed to investigate the ability of fishers to similarly control mountain beavers. This potential ecosystem service provided by fishers may be valuable to timber companies, because mountain beavers are generally considered a forestry "pest" species that damage seedlings and saplings. Timber companies sometimes use ARs to control mountain beavers, which poses a risk of secondary poisoning for fishers if they consume poisoned mountain beavers. The effects of ARs have had limited study in Washington, and our project is providing wildlife and land managers with information on the extent that ARs are entering food webs in remote forests. New AR regulations are being implemented in other states, such as California, and the information from this study may therefore inform amendment of existing AR regulations or development new regulations in Washington. Another aspect of this study was to document the fine-scale movement of fishers through winter snow-tracking, ground-based telemetry, and the collection of scats. The fisher occurrence data collected during telemetry and snow-tracking efforts have been provided to federal land managers (National Park Service and US Forest Service) and offer insights into the foraging behavior and landscape use of fishers public lands. Lastly, we are optimizing our metabarcoding techniques in ways that few prior studies have been able to through the utilization of fisher scats with known diet contents to create a reference for how the proportion of prey DNA reads from metabarcoding outputs can be applied to our quantitative diet summaries. With these optimizations, we are situated to make broad contributions to how metabarcoding techniques are applied in the non-invasive study of forest carnivores. Changes/Problems:The timeline for this project was delayed due to the withdrawal of MSc student Cameron Milne from the program at UW in winter 2020 and time needed to recruit new MSc student (Kayla Dreher), who started in Fall 2020. In addition, Covid-related laboratory closures has delayed genetics labwork. The project is on target to be completed in September 2022. Fisher establishment near the originally delineated study area where mountain beavers are most abundant was limited. Extensive telemetry searches for fishers released in the North Cascades recovery area revealed that the majority of fishers that survived 1-2 years following their release had established approximately 45 miles southeast of the original study area in a portion of the North-Central Cascades. This area had a drier climate, deeper snowpacks, and substantially less private forestry activity. Each of these factors result in lower mountain beaver densities than the northern recovery area. However, this unexpected outcome shouldn't affect our ability to evaluate the relationship between mountain beavers and fishers where their ranges overlap due to our incorporation of a robust scat dataset from the South Cascades recovery area, where the overlap of these species was well recorded. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?MSc Kayla Dreher has nearly completed coursework towards a Masters degree in Environmental and Forestry Sciences. She has gained extensive experience in conducting research through the execution of this project and under the mentorship of advisors Dr. Laura Prugh and Dr. Jason Ransom (NPS). Through this research assistantship, Kayla has led field data collection, coordinated with collaborators and contractors, trained and mentored field and lab assistants, and developed expertise in genetics methods in the University of Washington SEFS Shared Genetics Lab through performing DNA extractions from tissues and scat samples and PCRs on the extraction products. Once all biological samples are processed and datasets are compiled, she will perform the statistical analyses as part of her thesis research. The results will be presented at the North American Conference for Conservation Biology and the Washington Chapter of the Wildlife Society annual meeting. She is expected to defend her thesis in summer 2022. Each thesis chapter will be submitted for peer-reviewed publication. During the winter 2021 field season, field assistant Nathan Redon was provided training and experience in winter fieldwork, such as trailer towing, snowmobile riding, remote camera deployment, snow back-tracking, and biological sample collection. Additionally, two undergraduate researchers received training in the extraction of prey DNA of fisher scats. Two additional undergraduate students were trained in traditional methods of identifying contents in scat through manual sorting. One of these students will be conducting a comparison analysis of the diet results from metabarcoding and traditional scat sorting on a subset of fisher scats as their capstone thesis project, which will be submitted for peer-reviewed publication. In August 2021, the PI and graduate student visited Taal Levi's lab at Oregon State University to discuss and learn about new metabarcoding techniques. The Levi lab has extensive knowledge and experience conducting metabarcoding diet studies, and Dr. Levi gave a presentation and training on fecal metabarcoding methodologies over two days. This critical training informed our decisions of the most appropriate and current protocols to apply to this study. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?Following their release into the Washington Cascades, fishers have established territories throughout a spectrum of land ownerships. We aimed to promote the awareness of restored carnivore communities throughout our study area and the potential effects of ARs in food webs by contacting private landowners, organizations, and important local land managers adjacent to where our study was being conducted. Tall Timber in Leavenworth, WA is an organization that provides year-round youth camps near Lake Wenatchee to promote environmental education and outdoor recreation. We delivered project information and periodic updates while conducting our fieldwork near their facilities. We also corresponded closely with the Chelan-Douglas Land Trust (CDLT), an organization that partners with private landowners and local communities to enhance the stewardship of natural areas throughout the study area. We provided the CDLT with information on the fisher activity on their land throughout the study area and provided them with information on the ecological requirements of fishers. News reports on the discovery of the first fisher reproductive den located in the North Cascades, which was discovered due to the contributions of this project's winter field efforts, were disseminated through statewide and regional media outlets. This gave a higher profile to the continued research carried out by the fisher reintroduction team. The aims of this study were also described in the widely distributed Cascades Fisher Reintroduction Project Progress Report for April 2019 to June 2020. Lastly, the graduate student co-presented on the objectives and significance of this research in 1-hr virtual lectures to the Mount St Helens Institute and the Washington National Parks Fund which reached audiences of over 200 members. Once this research is complete, it will be disseminated further at research conferences, through peer-reviewed publication, and with science communication tools like an NPS fact sheet and an infographic. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?
Nothing Reported
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
The timeline for this project was delayed (see "Changes/Problems" section below). The project is on target to be completed by September 2022. Our data collection phase is complete and we are currently processing and compiling our datasets for analyses. Our accomplishments to date are summarized below. Fieldwork We collected an extensive catalog of biological samples from Washington fishers to analyze for diet contents using DNA metabarcoding and AR exposure testing. During the 2020 and 2021 summer field seasons, a detection dog team was contracted for a combined 26 search days. The search areas were informed by telemetry locations acquired from aerial and ground surveys in the 8 months prior to the searches. From January 2021 to April 2021, Dreher and field assistant Redon conducted telemetry and winter snow tracking of fishers in the North and Central Cascades to collect scats, recover mortalities, and record fine-scale movement data. 22 km of fine-scale movement data was collected, providing insights into the foraging behavior and space use of Cascade fishers. Between detection dog searches, ground telemetry efforts, winter snow tracking, and visual trail searches, we collected 343 fisher scats, and an additional 160 scats of co-occurring carnivores that were encountered opportunistically. We also obtained 175 fisher scats that were collected in the South Cascades reintroduction area by our agency partners (National Park Service and Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife). Anticoagulant Rodenticide (AR) Exposure Liver tissue and/or fur samples were collected from 24 fishers that died in the North and South Cascades reintroduction areas and 16 fishers that died in the Olympic reintroduction area, giving us a sample size of 40 fishers. All liver tissue samples have been analyzed for exposure to 8 different rodenticides for inclusion in our analyses on the relationships between landscape features, proportion of mountain beavers in the diet, and exposure levels of ARs. Methods development for the detection of ARs in fur samples have been completed by our project partners at Liphatech and the National Wildlife Research Center and have been approved for our use in this study. Genetics During Fall 2021, we extracted DNA from over 500 fisher scats and 160 scats of sympatric carnivores for dietary metabarcoding. These samples are undergoing sequencing for the identification of prey DNA within scats. These data will be used to characterize fisher diets by season and by sex. By conducting diet analyses on other carnivore species, we can also detect the partitioning of resources within forest carnivore communities. Through the successful application of metabarcoding methods, we are producing an extensive dataset of Washington fisher diets.
Publications
- Type:
Other
Status:
Published
Year Published:
2021
Citation:
Parsons, M, A Orloff, L Prugh. 2021. Evaluating live trapping and camera-based indices of small mammal density. Canadian Journal of Zoology. https://doi.org/10.1139/cjz-2020-0298
- Type:
Other
Status:
Published
Year Published:
2020
Citation:
Parsons, M, J Lewis, J Pauli, T Chestnut, J Ransom, D Werntz, L Prugh. 2020. Prey of reintroduced fishers and their habitat relationships in the Cascades Range, Washington. Forest Ecology and Management 460: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foreco.2020.117888.
|
Progress 10/01/19 to 09/30/20
Outputs
Target Audience:This project's goal is to provide information on the diet and habitat use of fishers (Pekania pennanti) to land managers in the North Cascade Mountains of Washington. The target audiences we focused on during this period includedthe Darrington Ranger District of the U.S. Forest Service, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, the National Park Service, and Sierra Pacific Industries. Changes/Problems:As mentioned above, withdrawal of Milne from the graduate program and project was a major setback for the project. This problem caused an unavoidable delay in progress. PI Prugh spent more time than initially planned to fill in where possible and to recruit a replacement student. Fortunately this effort was successful, and new student Kayla Dreher is making excellent progress on the project. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?The first graduate student on this project (Heather Milne) received training and professional development through graduate classes, project planning, discussions with collaborators, and genetics labwork. Genetics lab manager Ellie Reese and PI Prugh received professional development through learning about metabarcoding methods, which is a cutting-edge technique that is new to our lab. New MSc student Kayla Dreher began receiving training and professional development through graduate classes and project planning at the end of the reporting period. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?During this reporting period, we arranged 3 conference calls and Zoom meetings with agency collaborators at the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, National Park Service, Cascades Carnivore Project, USFWS, and Liphatech Inc. to update these stakeholders about project developments, and to obtain their feedback during the graduate recruitment process. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?Activities in the next reporting period will include development of a graduate committee and master's thesis proposal, planning and coordination of fieldwork, carrying out winter and summer fieldwork, conducting genetics labwork, and dissemination of results through stakeholder meetings. Due to the unforeseen delay in carrying out the project, dissemination of results via publications and presentations will most likely occur after the next reporting period.
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
The primary accomplishments this reporting period consisted of initiating labwork, arranging pilot fieldwork to collect fisher scats using a scat detection dog team, and recruiting a new MSc student. This project experienced a major setback that has delayed progress on the project--the MSc student originally recruited for the project, Heather Milne, decided to change career paths and withdrew from the program in February 2020. Prior to departing, Milne had made progress planning fieldwork, researching fecal metabarcoding methods, obtaining fisher scats from our collaborator Tara Chestnut (National Park Service) to test lab methods, ordering supplies, and conducting preliminary labwork. Following Milne's departure, PI Laura Prugh conducted an intensive recruitment effort in spring 2020 to find a suitable MSc student for the project. Fortunately, the recruitment effort was successful, and Kayla Dreher was recruited to join the project. Dreher has considerable field experience in the region, including winter fieldwork and carnivore scat collection experience, and a strong academic background. She joined the MSc program at the end of this reporting period (Sept 16, 2020) and began graduate coursework. Prugh arranged a pilot scat collection effort by contracting Rogue Detection Dog Teams for 10 days of surveying. Prugh coordinated with NPS and USFS collaborators to obtain locations of reintroduced fishers to plan survey efforts, and she worked with Patrick Tweedy of Sierra Pacific Industries to obtain permits for the dog team to access their land during surveys. The surveys were originally scheduled for August 2020, but the work was delayed due to wildfires and smoke. The surveys were conducted in October and were quite successful, with 156 scats collected during the 10-day survey period. We obtained an additional 64 fisher scats collected by our collaborator Jocelyn Akins (Cascades Carnivore Project).
Publications
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Progress 09/16/19 to 09/30/19
Outputs
Target Audience:The target audience of our efforts during the first 2 weeks of the project (this reporting period) were our collaborators: Katie Swift (Liphatech Inc.), Zachary Radmer (USFWS), and Jeff Lewis (WDFW). Changes/Problems:
Nothing Reported
What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?The graduate student on this project (Heather Milne) began coursework and discussions with collaborators about project development. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?
Nothing Reported
What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?Activities in the next reporting period will include development of a graduate committee and master's thesis proposal, planning and coordination of fieldwork, and carrying out summer fieldwork.
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
Nothing to report.
Publications
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