Assessing cumulative impacts of forest development on the abundance and distribution of furbearers.

Furbearer populations across the central-interior of British Columbia, Canada, are exposed to the cumulative impacts of landscape change, particularly as a result of forest harvesting. I elicited knowledge from furbearer experts to develop habitat models for three furbearer species: fisher (Pekania pennanti), Canada lynx (Lynx Canadensis), and American marten (Martes americana), and applied the models to reference landscapes to quantify changes in habitat availability and quality from 1990 to 2013. Where forest harvesting was extensive, the models predicted substantial declines in habitat for each focal species. I used trapping records and negative binomial count models to investigate the relationship between habitat change and population abundance of lynx and marten. The top-ranked count models identified combinations of trapping effort, trapline area, and habitat availability and quality as having significantly positive effects on capture success. These results demonstrate the utility of expert knowledge for studying cumulative impacts of landscape change on furbearers. --Leaf ii.