An Approach to Quantifying Long-term Habitat Change on Managed Forest Lands

Forest land managers must determine the effects of their management on nontarget resources, resources for which no current inventory is available, and for which no past trend information exists. The tools available to managers to make these determinations consist of the inventory information gathered for those commodities desired to be produced, i.e., the target resources. A method is proposed here, using available land use records and bid data sets for the Savannah River Site, to reconstruct past land use conditions and bird community composition and distribution. In addition to describing habitat change and resource response, the method can estimate the amount of uncertainty inherent in assessing implications of land management decisions for nontarget resources.