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Résumé :
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Large-scale resource assessments are required by the Forest and Rangeland Renewable Resources Planning Act of 1974. This report describes the wildlife component of a regional modeling framework used to analyze multiple resource response to land management. The modeling framework, as applied in the southern United States, links fish, forage, water, and wildlife resources to land use and timber models. White-tailed deer and wild turkey were selected for analysis and their recent historical status was reviewed. Habitat-based wildlife models were developed to analyze the impacts of land use and timber management. Discriminant function analysis was used to model the relationship between deer and turkey density classes with areal estimates of cropland, rangeland, urbanland, timber management types, and forest age classes within a county. Projected changes in the land base for a baseline and several alternative scenarios were applied to the wildlife models. Over a 50-year projection period, deer and turkey densities declined in response to increasing urbanization and conversion of natural forest types to pine plantations. This research has improved the capability to assess wildlife over large geographic areas and has demonstrated the feasibility of developing regional multiple resource analysis systems from existing land base inventories.
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