Novel approaches to conserving the viability of regional wildlife populations in response to landscape and climate change

The proactive actions needed to prevent loss of biodiversity from global change have left managers and biologists looking for approaches that can predict how species and populations will respond to this threat and help guide conservation to address it. However, the need to predict how climate change will impact wildlife species has exposed limitations in how well current approaches model important biological processes at scales at which those processes interact with climate. Conservation planning is also hampered by uncertainty in how species will respond to conservation actions amidst impacts from landscape and climate change and complicated by the complexities of the planning decisions, including tradeoffs among competing species objectives. Therefore, this doctoral research focused on the development of approaches that can overcome these limitations to guide conservation. In chapter 1 we developed a comprehensive approach that combined recent advances in landscape and population modeling into dynamic-landscape metapopulation models (DLMPs) to predict responses of two declining songbird species in the Central Hardwoods region of the U.S. to changes in forest conditions from climate change. Changes in habitat and metapopulation processes produced contrasting predictions for future populations of wood thrush and prairie warblers, allowing us to identify that relationships between climate change, succession, and land management are species-