The U.S.’s population is becoming more concentrated in suburban and exurban areas. This is creating landscapes where human activity and infrastructure come in direct contact with undeveloped land; these landscapes are known as wildland-urban interfaces (WUIs). Living in a WUI can pose threats to natural ecosystems by contributing to habitat loss and fragmentation, in addition to introducing exotic and invasive species (including domestic pets).
The Wasatch Mountains and surrounding valleys form a quintessential WUI. Nearly one-half of Utah’s population lives within the Wasatch Mountain WUI, the third highest percent in the nation. Furthermore, the Wasatch Mountains contain the most highly recreated national forests in the Intermountain West, many of which are adjacent to a population that has grown at a faster rate than any other state in the nation over the past decade.
As human populations continue to grow, WUIs will become more prevalent. For this reason, research on these landscapes is urgently needed. Specifically, research on species’ spatial and temporal adaptability to anthropogenic change can lead to improved management and conservation of WUIs.
Wasatch Wildlife Watch leverages the power of both community science and non-invasive remote sensing through camera trapping to investigate how varying human stressors affect species distributions and activity levels. Through a community science training and education program that has, to date, involved over 600 individual participants, 438 camera stations have been setup across the Central Wasatch Mountain Range and surrounding Salt Lake Valley. This has resulted in over 1,000,000 photographs and nearly 150,000 independent wildlife events in two years. Furthermore, each citizen science team is individually trained to conduct an intensive radial survey at each site, documenting vegetation and human development characteristics that are used for analysis.
Results/Conclusions
Small, federally protected areas concentrated in the north of the Central Wasatch Mountains serve as habitat refugia for multiple species in this WUI. In fact, these protected areas may be a major factor facilitating persistence of species susceptible to current levels of human influence. However, interstate highway 80 has been identified as a major source of habitat fragmentation, potentially cutting off these protected areas from populations in the south. Hiking traffic has not been shown to decrease species’ habitat usage, but the presence of domestic pets has an effect on mesocarnivore spatiotemporal activity. Finally, on-the-ground measurements from citizen scientists have proven valuable at predicting which species are effected by fine-scale development, vehicle traffic, and anthropogenic noise levels.