USGS Trust Species and Habitats Branch: Bats, Ferrets, Sage-Grouse and Plague

Some of the biggest problems wildlife face are changes to their environment, natural and human-made. Resource managers, planners, policymakers, industry and private landowners need to know how populations are doing, what habitat species need and what roles they play, how they respond to change and will respond in future, and how to avoid unintended harm.

The Trust Species and Habitats Branch of the U.S. Geological Survey's Fort Collins Science Center brings together wildlife biology, ecosystem ecology, quantitative ecology, disease ecology, molecular genetics and stable-isotope geochemistry. Working with partners worldwide, it provides the information, tools and technology needed to conserve, manage and restore populations of land vertebrates, their habitats and the ecosystems they support.

Areas of expertise

Species conservation. Landscapes are changing on a large scale, shifting where species live and how many there are. Many affected species need focused management — some to be pulled back from the brink of extinction — yet little is known about their life history, status or distribution, or how changes in their numbers alter ecosystems. The branch develops tools and research on species' distribution, interactions, condition and conservation needs, used by the Department of the Interior, states and others.

Molecular genetics. Genetic data strengthen studies of population dynamics and viability, reveal population structure and gene flow, estimate population size and survival, and document genetic diversity. Newer genomic methods study how genes respond to environmental stress, how geography and environment shape gene flow, drift and selection, how emerging diseases arise and spread, and how invasive species and contaminants affect wildlife.

Wildlife disease. Ecological change in the United States is bringing wildlife, people and disease into closer contact, upsetting disease cycles in wild hosts and in humans and threatening many imperilled species. Lost wildlife also means lost ecosystem services that support human health and economies. Branch scientists work with researchers and managers worldwide on how wildlife diseases spread and how to manage them.

Biometrics. Mathematical and statistical models are powerful for understanding how ecological systems are built and how they change. The branch develops and tests models suited to the peculiarities of ecological data, to get the most out of costly, difficult field studies.

Stable isotopes. Two facts make isotopes powerful: an organism's tissues carry the isotopic signature of what it eats or grows in, and those signatures vary from place to place. Together they reveal diets and migration routes of birds, mammals and fish, and how contaminants cycle and build up — bridging earth and life sciences for conservation.

Selected projects

• Bats at wind turbines. Wind power is one of the world's fastest-growing industries and a step away from nonrenewable energy, but unprecedented numbers of tree-roosting bats are dying at turbines on several continents. The causes are unknown, but the pattern of deaths offers clues. With other USGS centres and federal, state and non-governmental partners, the branch is studying the seasonal ranges, habitat and migration of the most vulnerable species; whether mating or feeding behaviour leads to collisions; new video methods for watching bats around turbines at night; and whether turbines attract bats — work pointing toward ways to monitor and perhaps prevent the deaths.
• Sage-grouse genetics. Greater and Gunnison sage-grouse have been considered for listing under the Endangered Species Act, declining mainly through loss and fragmentation of sagebrush. Conserving them means keeping populations connected. Combining genetic data with landscape data — habitat, roads, energy development, elevation — branch geneticists are identifying what blocks the birds' movement, defining meaningful populations and measuring how connected they are, so managers can focus where it helps most.
• Plague. The flea-borne plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, arrived in North America a little over a century ago and has since reshaped native animal communities. It now occurs throughout the ranges of every North American prairie dog species — the only habitat and main prey of the endangered black-footed ferret — causing periodic, sometimes dramatic die-offs of both. It also threatens recovery of the threatened Utah prairie dog. The branch is testing vaccines and insecticides to measure plague's effects on survival, field-testing a vaccine delivered in bait for prairie dogs, studying how plague persists in the environment, and watching for insecticide resistance in fleas.

• Diets from isotopes. Diet studies from stomach contents or scat are hard to run and give only snapshots, and introduced species, degraded habitat, pollution and climate change can transform what food is available. With other USGS scientists, agencies and universities, the branch is using isotopes to learn how polar bears forage, as a baseline for future habitat loss; test whether nutritional stress is behind the decline of Steller sea lions; assess a gillnet ban's effects on bottlenose dolphins; reconstruct aquatic food webs before and after invasions; time a long-distance shorebird's arrival in the Arctic from a change in its diet; and trace marine nutrients in young salmon.
• Limits, not just averages. Animal numbers and survival are only partly set by the habitat measured, so models of the average response miss much. Quantile regression instead models several points of the distribution. The branch has refined it for trout densities in streams, fish body condition, habitat goals on National Wildlife Refuges and 40 years of stream-water quality, and adapted it to small counts to study how climate, parents and habitat affected California spotted owl fledglings over 20 years in Lassen National Forest.

Sources

• Stevens, P., and Walters, K., 2015, Trust Species and Habitat Branch — Using the innovative approaches of today to conserve biodiversity for tomorrow: U.S. Geological Survey Fact Sheet 2014–3071, Fort Collins Science Center. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/fs20143071
• Photos: Dean Biggins, Marcy Marot, Paul Cryan and Tonie Rocke, U.S. Geological Survey; U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; Alan Franklin, U.S. Department of Agriculture — from the fact sheet's PDF. Two photographs credited to outside photographers are left out.
• Corrected: the sheet writes "Stellar sea lions"; the species is the Steller sea lion.
• Rewritten in hubnx's own words.