How Visitors and Park Management Affect Acadia's Small Mammals

A research brief from Acadia National Park. The researcher's own updates are paraphrased here.

Red squirrels, chipmunks, voles, mice and other small mammals are part of Acadia National Park's wildlife. Because they are important prey for other animals and help spread the seeds of trees and other plants, they are recognised as indicators of ecological change.

People and wildlife

• Encounters with visitors can delight people but stress some animals, and if they happen often enough the animals may avoid busy areas.
• Habitat can be damaged by visitors.
• Management also has effects: to offset recreation, managers restore damaged areas such as the summit of Cadillac Mountain and other peaks, remove invasive plants that travel on visitors' shoes and clothes, and close trails to protect animals such as peregrine falcons — but that work can disturb wildlife too.

Little is known about these interactions in Acadia. "Ecological interactions are among the wonders that draw people to Acadia and to wildlife," said Bik Wheeler, a wildlife biologist with Acadia National Park. "To effectively manage wildlife in the park it is critical to understand both the physical presence of wildlife and ecological interactions, including those with humans."

The study

Dr. Brittany Slabach, a Second Century Stewardship Fellow and professor of biology holding the Emily and Mitch Rales Chair in Ecology at College of the Atlantic, studies how landscape ecology and park management affect the diversity of small mammals. Elsewhere she has found that even where habitats are varied, small mammals tend to live in isolated spots away from places busy with visitors or undergoing habitat restoration.

In Acadia she uses live traps and wildlife cameras at sites with different kinds of disturbance, catching and releasing animals from summer into winter to capture the changes between seasons.

Progress by June 2024

• Trail cameras: in the first season, students ran a camera study that took more than 60,000 photographs, documenting more than seventeen species on Schoodic Peninsula trails — from deer mice to moose — and how their use of the trails changed with the seasons.
• Weasels: weasels are known to live on Schoodic Peninsula but are rarely photographed, so a second camera study uses a scent lure. The cameras went out in June for monitoring through August; the first rebaiting found no weasel, but a bull moose.
• Old logging: on Schoodic Peninsula, trapping found six species of small mammals and interesting differences in diversity between forests disturbed in the past, for example by logging, and old-growth forest. The long-term project will look further at habitats and competition between species.
• Mountain summits: in 2023 the team trapped deer mice and eastern meadow voles on Sargent Mountain, where vegetation is being restored. Next, they will trap on Sargent and on Pemetic Mountain, which is not part of the soil restoration and so serves as a comparison, and fit collars to learn how far the animals range and whether they interact with seeded plots.

The project posts updates on Instagram as @littleboxproject.

Sources

• National Park Service, Acadia National Park, "Research Brief: Small Mammals and their response to Disturbance." https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/acadsmallmammals.htm
• The source's photographs, credited to Ellie Jackson of the Schoodic Institute, are not reproduced.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.