Browsing by Subject "Red Wolf"

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Open Access
A Comprehensive Assessment of Red Wolf Reintroduction Sites
(2018-04-24) O'Neal, Shane
The red wolf (Canis rufus) is the world’s rarest wild canid, with fewer than 60 wolves living in the wild, and likely even fewer than 40. After being declared extinct in the wild in 1980, the wolf was reintroduced to Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge in North Carolina in 1987 and successfully established itself, with the small initial population growing to 150 within two decades. Recent increases in mortality have reduced the wolf’s numbers to their current low levels, and the Fish and Wildlife Service now faces the difficult decision of where else to reintroduce the red wolf within its historic range. This Masters Project is an attempt to analyze the current landscape of the Southeast from both an ecological and sociological perspective to determine the best possible places for red wolves to successfully establish a new population. I first conducted a literature review to identify key variables that affect the suitability of an area and found five such factors: available habitat, available prey, concentrations of livestock, recreational hunters, and the age of local residents. The reintroduction effort has to begin on federally owned and protected land, and so I next set out to select a suite of potential sites for the reintroduction to take place, establishing a list of 21 such locations. The relationship between all of the variables I considered is complex, so to properly weight them against each other I surveyed 14 experts in red wolf biology and management. I received responses from 10 of the experts and used this information to construct models in ArcGIS to determine the overall suitability of a site. After assembling a Weighted Sum model based on available data and calculating descriptive statistics, the sites all received a suitability score. The highest-scoring sites were Croatan National Forest in North Carolina and Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge in Georgia. Fish and Wildlife should focus future reintroduction efforts on these locations, which strike the best available balance between suitable ecology and low chances of human-wolf conflict.
Open Access
Habitat Connectivity and Suitability for Canis rufus Recovery
(2013-04-24) Desmul, Lindsey
Red wolves historically lived throughout the southeastern United States. However their numbers were significantly reduced to the point of extinction in 1980. Prior to extinction, U.S. Fish and Wildlife managers were able to capture the last remaining 14 purebred wolves from the wild and put them into a captive breeding program. Once their captive population had reached a stable number, red wolves were reintroduced to the Albemarle Peninsula in North Carolina. While the reintroduction program has been successful, resulting in a growing wild population, the Albemarle Peninsula is threatened by sea level rise and there is a growing concern about habitat connectivity and the potential for wolves to move inland. In this study, a connectivity analysis was conducted for North Carolina to determine if urban growth and sea level rise might result in decreased potential for natural movement of the wolves over the next several decades. A geospatial analysis was conducted to identify possible bottlenecks to wolf dispersal, represented by pinch points in modeled dispersal corridors. These corridors entailed creating a ‘cost surface’ as a map of relative resistance to wolf dispersal, with cost reflecting several variables: land cover, urban density, housing density, road density, sea level rise, and slope. Using a model of sea-level rise created by The Nature Conservancy, a rise in sea level of 0.38 meters by 2050 would cause the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge to be highly disconnected from the mainland of North Carolina, complicating movement for a large portion of the red wolf population from their current habitat range. Compared to current habitat connectivity, the results show that while the overall route of movement by wolves may not drastically change, several bottlenecks caused from interstate and highway density, urban sprawl, and sea level rise flooding may impair movement to some extent. These barriers can be mitigated by constructing highway under- or overpasses and planting greenway corridors to make migration safer and easier for the wolves in the future.