Selecting suitable candidate areas for habitat reserves to sustain future populations of Spotted Owls requires consideration of many different criteria and incorporation of multiple spatial and aspatial sources of information. A ranked list of candidate reserves must consider how the amount and configuration of habitat in the landscape would meet different population goals for a target species now and in the future, considering the dynamics created by land management policies, habitat changes, and population responses. Given the complexity of these considerations, the Canadian Spotted Owl Recovery Team (CSORT) identified the need for a dynamic habitat reserve location model to identify and evaluate options for a landscape-level reserve network.

Services: Cortex worked with ecologists and habitat specialists for the Northern Spotted Owl to develop criteria for reserve attributes to support recovery targets over the period 2005-2055. Using models of habitat, territories, and spatial landscape dynamics previously developed by Cortex, we selected and ranked areas for priority habitat protection using biological and risk criteria that best reflected a balance of objectives prescribed by CSORT.

Outcomes: Reserve maps generated by our analyses were used by the British Columbia inter-agency governmental planning teams to revise the Spotted Owl habitat management zones to be consistent with the Recovery Strategy.