Habitat Corridor - Monitoring Use

Monitoring Use

It is extremely important for researchers to pay attention to the population changes in animals after a corridor has been implemented to ensure that there are no harmful effects. Researchers can use both mark-recapture techniques and evaluate genetic flow in order to observe how much a corridor is being used. Marking and recapturing animals is more useful when keeping a close eye on individual movement (Mech & Hallet 2001). The only problem is that tagging animals and watching them does not tell anyone whether the migrating individuals are successfully mating with other populations in connected areas of land. On the other hand, genetic techniques can be more effective in evaluating migration and mating patterns.

One of the most important goals of developing a corridor is to increase migration in certain animal species. By looking at a population’s gene flow, researchers can understand the genetic consequences of corridors (Mech & Hallett 2001). The migration patterns of an entire population are much more important than the movements of a few individuals. From these techniques, researchers will better understand whether or not habitat corridors are increasing biodiversity.

Stephen Mech and James Hallett introduce an additional reason genetic techniques are more useful; they “measure average migration rates over time, which reveals the effects of fragmentation of several generations and is not as sensitive to current population sizes as mark-recapture studies are.” For example, when a population is extremely small, mark-recapture is almost impossible. Clearly, genetic analysis of a species is the best way to determine if animals are actually using corridors to move and reproduce.