woodland recovery after suppression of deer cascade effects for small mammals, wood mice (apodemus sylvaticus) and bank voles (myodes glareolus)林地恢复后压制鹿的级联效应对小型哺乳动物,木头老鼠(apodemus sylvaticus)和银行田鼠(myod glareolus).pdf

Woodland Recovery after Suppression of Deer: Cascade effects for Small Mammals, Wood Mice (Apodemus sylvaticus) and Bank Voles (Myodes glareolus) Emma R. Bush*, Christina D. Buesching, Eleanor M. Slade, David W. Macdonald Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom Abstract Over the past century, increases in both density and distribution of deer species in the Northern Hemisphere have resulted in major changes in ground flora and undergrowth vegetation of woodland habitats, and consequentially the animal communities that inhabit them. In this study, we tested whether recovery in the vegetative habitat of a woodland due to effective deer management (from a peak of 0.4–1.5 to ,0.17 deer per ha) had translated to the small mammal community as an example of a higher order cascade effect. We compared deer-free exclosures with neighboring open woodland using capture-mark-recapture (CMR) methods to see if the significant difference in bank vole (Myodes glareolus) and wood mouse (Apodemus sylvaticus) numbers between these environments from 2001–2003 persisted in 2010. Using the multi-state Robust Design method in program MARK we found survival and abundance of both voles and mice to be equivalent between the open woodland and the experimental exclosures with no differences in various metrics of population structure (age structure, sex composition, reproductive activity) and individual fitness (weight), although the vole population showed variation both locally and temporally. This suggests that the vegetative habitat - having passed some threshold of complexity due to lowered deer density - has allowed recovery of the small mammal community, alth