USING NOVEL AND TRADITIONAL SURVEY TECHNIQUES TO MONITOR SMALL MAMMAL SPECIES IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST

Sydney L McCluskey; Humboldt State University; slm1074@humboldt.edu; Barbara A. Clucas

Increased biodiversity loss and extinction rates across the globe are accentuating the need for effective conservation measures to be established. The ability to monitor species in an ecosystem using efficient techniques is a crucial conservation and management tool in order for changes in the populations to be detected. Monitoring small mammals in forested habitats can be challenging, due to their size, activity patterns, and frequently nocturnal nature. The traditional technique of live trapping (LT) and marking of individuals has many challenges associated with it, including being time-consuming and expensive, as well as result in injury or even death for the study organism. More novel small mammal survey techniques such as camera trapping (CT) and acoustic recording (AR) have proven to be successful minimally-invasive methods in monitoring some small mammal populations. In this study we compared the effectiveness of novel detection methods (i.e. CT and AR) with traditional LT methods in monitoring small mammal populations in the Pacific Northwest. We focused on the efficiency of each method in detecting species and in their time and cost effectiveness in surveying small mammal populations. The preliminary results from this study indicate that CT survey methods may be the most efficient method in detecting small mammal species compared with LT and AR. Lack of data in confirming small mammal identification through AR was a shortcoming to this study. CT methods show a lot of potential in future small mammal monitoring studies.

Poster Session  Zoom Presentation