COLUMBIANA COUNTY
SOIL AND WATER DISTRICT
Serving Columbiana County’s natural resource and agriculture needs
WILDLIFE MANAGEMENT
Wildlife Management is the art and science of manipulating both wildlife populations and habitats to achieve desired goals that benefit both wildlife and human populations. Wildlife can be managed to help increase, decrease, or maintain populations. To manage these, we utilize a variety of techniques including population protection via law enforcement, population monitoring, research, habitat management, and species recovery and reintroduction. For us habitat management is our most utilized technique in both our management recommendations and conservation programs which we help administer through our services here at Columbiana Soil and Water.
HABITAT MANAGEMENT
Habitat is an area with a combination of resources (food, water, and shelter) and environmental conditions (temperature, precipitation, and absence of predators) that promotes the occupancy by individuals of a given species and allows for those individuals to both survive and reproduce. High quality habitat will support high survival rates over relatively long periods of time.
Marginal habitat will promote occupancy, but rates of survival and reproduction are lower.
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Low quality habitat will promote some occupancy, but individuals are unlikely to survive and reproduce.
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By understanding this we are then able to understand the importance of proper habitat and how it related directly to the species being managed. From here we then need to understand the importance of managing different types of habitats and what each type provides for wildlife.
Wildlife habitat can be broken down into different into a variety of different cover types which all provide a different necessary need to the wildlife being managed. These different cover types consist of the following.​
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Escape cover which protects from predators.
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Thermal cover which protects from freezing rain, snow, and cold temperatures.
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Loafing cover which is where the animal will rest to conserve energy.
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Feeding cover providing a place for the animal to feed.
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Breeding/ brood nest rearing providing a place for reproduction or rearing of the young
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Early successional habitat is essential for many wildlife species. These stages, when looking at the diagram above, are part of the Grasses and weeds, mixed herbaceous plants, shrubs, and young forest stages specifically. Our Mature forests and our mid successional stages which are composed of oaks and hickories. Finally, our late successional habitat contains the climax forests which are mostly made up of beech and sugar maples.
As mentioned previously the diffrent habitat cover types provide the basic outline of what is required by the wildlife species to be successful in survival and reproduction. All these diffrent cover types stem from the different successional stages about. Not all these stages provide the same benefits to all different species of wildlife, but they do provide some benefit to each in many cases.
POLLINATORS
More than 85% of our flowering plants need pollinators to make them productive. It is also known that approximately 1/3 of our food is pollinator dependent and nationally these crops equivalate to close to 30 billion dollars of revenue annually to the United States. In the modern day our pollinators are in trouble. 40% of our native pollinating insects are facing extinction. In the United States close to 150 species of butterflies are at risk. This is especially true for the Monarch butterfly as it has seen more than an 80% decline in the past 2 decades.
Early successional habitat such as that of native warm season grasses, mixed herbaceous plants, and shrubs helps provide proper habitat for many of these pollinators. This habitat consists of flowers for forage, habitat for reproduction, and un-mowed areas used to help some of these pollinating insects overwinter.