Non-brooding northern bobwhite resource selection during breeding season in a managed longleaf pine ecosystem

Investigating resource selection patterns of declining species is critical to developing effective conservation strategies and mitigating negative population trends. We trapped and radio-collared northern bobwhite (Colinus virginianus) and recorded the location of each individual three times per week during the northern bobwhite breeding season (April – September) to infer resource selection by non-brooding adults. We defined 13 vegetation communities with varying fire histories and assessed their relative use via a distance-based logistic regression model within a Bayesian framework. We found reliable evidence that non-brooding northern bobwhite preferred supplemental feed lines, recently burned natural pine stands, one-year rough in shrub/scrub, and one-year rough in hardwood-pine stands. Conversely, we found they avoided one-year rough in natural pine stands, recently burned shrub/scrub, and recently burned hardwood-pine stands. Our data suggest that non-brooding bobwhite’s successional stage preference may vary between vegetation communities within the same study area and adds further evidence to the importance of fire and vegetation interspersion in bobwhite management. Results from our study may be applied to enhance habitat for non-brooding northern bobwhite and potentially increase adult survival, an important metric correlated with bobwhite population growth.

Methods
We determined locations of non-brooding bobwhite three times per week during the breeding season to infer third-order resource selection by non-brooding adults. We calculated bobwhite utilization distributions using the 95% fixed kernel density estimator, and generated 10 random points for each known point within each bobwhite's utilization distribution. We defined 13 land cover types and used a distance-based approach within a Bayesian framework to infer resource selection.