Dexter P. Hodder

A better understanding of how moose Alces alces select and browse plants may allow ecologists to make better predictions about how herbivores and plants interact, herbivore food acquisition, and how organisms may shape their own forage supply. This in turn, can lead to a better understanding of animal responses to plant nutrients and defences, and how and why animals move across landscapes, select certain habitats, reproduce, interact with predators and competitors, and survive. Here, we used sequential feeding trials conducted in north-central British Columbia with 4 hand-reared, 9-month-old, orphaned moose calves to study winter shoot selection from ramets cut from native willowsSalix scouleriana. Our generalized linear models indicated that, when browsing, moose calves generally followed principles of optimal patchuse theory and initially selected smaller, less fibrous shoots at the beginning of feeding trials, then switched to larger shoots as smaller, more nutritious shoots were depleted. On average, moose calves removed 20% of the shoot biomass from each ramet trialled and cropped shoots at an average of 5.03mm in diameter. Bite diameters taken by calves were larger when a greater proportion of shoots from ramets had been selected from ramets that had been browsed in previous years and inlater feeding trials. Despite some study limitations, our findings provide these and other fine-scaled details contextualized within a backdrop ofprior research regarding browse selection by young moose that may help to elucidate connections between browsing behaviours and estimates ofintake rate. These findings may help to inform future studies in whichforage ecologists are seeking to understand optimal foraging and browse patch depletion dynamics in moose and other species.

A diverse landscape can support a more diverse range of species and allow for more complex community structures. In forested habitats, openings and changes in tree composition allow for a higher species richness due to the greater chance of niche occupancy. Knowledge about these relationships may be useful for adapting forest harvesting strategies to, for example, support bird diversity conservation and studies are required to understand how different harvesting strategies influence forest structure and bird diversity. Here, we used Autonomous Recording Units (ARU) to record dawn signalling of forest birds between two forest-harvesting treatment types (complete clear-cuts and hardwood-retention patches) vs control forest patches in the John Prince Research Forest, British Columbia, Canada. We compared Species Richness and Shannon diversity as detected through identifying species in audio recordings, across treatments. The observed Species Richness and Shannon diversity did differ between the Retention treatment and Forest controls when controlling for number of individuals sampled, but both had higher Species Richness and Shannon diversity of passerine species than the Clear-cut treatments. When comparing species composition, we found that forest-associated species were disproportionately detected in Forest controls compared to Clear-cut treatments but detected at intermediate levels in Retention treatments. Species associated with early-seral habitats, though, had disproportionate detection in Clear-cut treatments compared to Forest controls, but also showed expected detections in Retention treatments. These results suggest that partial harvesting and retention of non-commercial hardwoods, can help retain forest-associated species while also helping attract early-seral avian species; this can help increase the overall diversity of the landscape while still making logging profitable. Further research should be conducted to determine the value of this retained habitat at different spatial scales to understand the impacts that it may have for larger-scale deployment.