Identifying the Influences of Fire, Climate Change, and Habitat on California’s Population of Mountain Quail through Time to Inform Population Management
Mountain Quail are one of the least studied quail in North America (Crawford 2000). As such, basic life history information necessary to inform management decisions, such as population abundance, distribution, trends, and habitat associations, are not well understood across its broad geographic range in California. The montane habitats this species occupies in California are rapidly changing, but it is not clear how climate change, altered fire regimes, insect-driven deforestation, and other factors may be affecting their populations. Understanding the current status of this species and the factors that influence their populations is important to inform data driven Mountain Quail management approaches, including setting harvest quotas and guiding habitat management and restoration.
While some assessments using Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) data suggest a stable (Church et al. 1993, Ziolkowski 2022) or potentially declining (Miller et al. 2017) Mountain Quail population in California, these data are not suitable for identify important temporal and spatial changes that would be necessary to evaluate the effects of habitat and environmental changes at scales meaningful to inform most management decisions.
The objectives of this project are to:
- Unlock tens of thousands of hours of existing Autonomous Recording Unit (ARU) data by developing a workflow for detecting Mountain Quail from audio recordings.
- Develop Mountain Quail occupancy and abundance estimates and trends from 2010- 2021 using existing USFS and CDFW-funded regional monitoring datasets for the Sierra Nevada, Cascades, and northwestern California.
- Use these data to understand the effects of fire, climate change, and habitat attributes on Mountain Quail abundance, and make management recommendations based on the findings.
- Inform approaches for a state-wide monitoring framework to track Mountain Quail populations to guide management of the species across the state.