David Guildford - News Center Maine - May 9, 2022
For University of Maine wildlife habitat professor Alessio Mortelliti, seeing a marten in a stretch of Maine woods means those woods are healthy ... "In terms of when you have those predators, it means you have the whole food chain below them." ... Studying the marten habitat automatically means studying other vital Maine species like bears, deer, moose, and squirrels with less time and money ... "I think what we’re seeing now is much more holistic foresters that come prepared to handle the demands that society has placed on our forest," Weiskittel said. "As we train the foresters today, they’re thinking about much broader things than just the typical tree diameter [and] tree height. It’s about wildlife habitat," he continued. "It’s about conservation value."
Sam Schipani - April 8, 2022 - UMaine News
A group of University of Maine researchers led by Alessio Mortelliti, an associate professor in the Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Conservation Biology, found that the American marten could serve as an effective “umbrella monitoring species” for 11 other mammal species in Maine. Umbrella monitoring species are those whose monitoring efforts are also found to overlap with a number of other species. As such, they are useful in reducing the effort required for important monitoring programs, which collect repeated observations or measurements of wildlife to ensure environmental management goals are being met.
Alessio Mortelliti et al. - Nature - 03 February 2022
Our analyses show that up to 11 species benefit from an umbrella effect under a monitoring protocol designed for American marten (Figs. 3, 4, 5) at three different management objectives: the detection of 10%, 25%, and 50% declines in occupancy. The effect is consistent across management objectives in the case of several species (black bear, red squirrel, deer, fisher, and snowshoe hare), and encompasses up to 100% of the townships surveyed (Figs. 3, 4, 5). Some species (coyote, raccoon, and short-tailed weasel) show an umbrella effect when marten are monitored for high effort objectives (10% marten decline, Fig. 3) or when only a large detectable change in the non-target species is needed (i.e., 50% decline in red fox, lynx, and moose, Fig. 3). The least covered species were bobcat and porcupine ...
