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ETD_2433

http://hdl.rutgers.edu/1782.2/rucore10001600001.ETD.000052112

theses

Regulations guiding land development around seasonal isolated wetlands disregard habitat requirements for specialized faunal inhabitants. This oversight needs to be addressed at multiple scales in order to sustain future seasonal pond inhabitants. In particular, pool-breeding amphibians are suffering worldwide decline and are susceptible to water quality, temperature, hydrology and watershed impacts. The complex aquatic-terrestrial lifecycle of amphibians
makes them sensitive to terrestrial habitat alterations and fragmentation. The temporal variation in hydroperiod within individual ponds and variation in
hydrology across ponds within a landscape create a stochastic system. In these systems amphibian populations likely function as metapopulations, and rely on juvenile dispersal and rescue effects to counter local extinction. Given the limited regulations at the local, state and federal level, maintaining amphibian breeding
populations will require efforts at the pond, migration corridor, upland habitat, watersheds and regional connectivity levels. Addressing these gaps requires
further basic research to expose hidden aspects of amphibian lifecycle patterns, in part due to their fossorial nature as well as the challenges of interpreting
metapopulation connectivity. Addressing the gaps also requires translating the ecological requirements into preservation tactics within the pressures of land
development, which poses substantial challenges. I utilized designed experiments, which serve as a hybrid research and planning approach, to navigate these complex circumstances. Here, I present a series of large-scale field experiments situated within a 500-hectare privately owned suburban development project located in Tuxedo, New York. The field experiments were implemented as part of the masterplanning process with the aim of exposing and
addressing several of these regulatory gaps from both a basic science and applied solutions perspective. A series of drift fence and pit-fall trap experiments provides data at the scale of individual breeding populations and their migration patterns to and from ponds. Larval density studies utilizing replicate enclosures evaluate the impact of within pond density versus variability of habitat quality across ponds. This analysis provides a bioassay of species performance teasing apart the presumed dominant effect of density versus variation across ponds. The results of this study indicate that physical and biotic pond scale factors have
a far greater effect on survival and fecundity than density. These results differ from the environmental consultant's evaluation of the same ponds and call into
question the current rapid assessment of pond habitat.

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 233-237)

by Alexander Jacob Felson

doi:10.7282/T39023ZF

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.

ETD

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