Habitat selection by woodland caribou in managed boreal forest of northeastern Ontario

Woodland caribou Rangifer tarandus caribou have been extirpated from most of the southern boreal forest of Ontario, and managers require an understanding of caribou spatio-temporal and habitat requirements, as well as, the potential impacts of different forest management activities.; Using satellite telemetry data collected from 30 female woodland caribou between 1998 and 2001, I found that variation in home range size corresponded to seasonal and habitat features important to caribou. In general, caribou occupied smaller ranges when preferred mature conifer was abundant. I used moose (Alces alces) density as an indicator of predation risk and found that caribou range size was positively correlated with moose density during long-range movements and negatively correlated with moose density during sedentary periods. High amounts of cutovers within ranges were positively correlated with range size during long-range movements and negatively correlated with range size during sedentary periods.; I compared the explanatory power of an aerial Forest Resource Inventory (FRI) and Landsat derived land cover inventory to account for variation in vegetation communities available to woodland caribou. Canonical correspondence analysis revealed strong relationships between forest inventories and vegetation communities derived from field data. Forest Resource Inventory species factors had greater power to explain variation in community composition than did Landsat habitat classes; however, Landsat structural variables accounted for more variation than did FRI structural variables.; I explored relationships between caribou habitat selection and limiting factors using resource selection functions derived from caribou telemetry data and forest inventory data. Coarse-scale selection of mature black spruce forest by caribou was associated with reduced moose densities within seasonal ranges. Selection at both scales provided caribou with greater access to arboreal and terrestrial lichens. Caribou selected areas of greater habitat diversity at a smaller scale, reflecting their diverse needs for forage, predator avoidance, and shelter.; Using a stochastic optimization model, I found that forest management strategies that included caribou objectives produced greater probabilities of caribou occurrence than a strategy lacking caribou constraints. No strategy exhibited a substantial loss to forest harvest volume. My findings support using a combination of spatial and aspatial habitat supply targets to conserve caribou in managed forests.