DOI: 10.5061/dryad.c59zw3rdb
title: Data for: At a fine scale, hardwood patches support wildlife diversity in longleaf pine woodlands

description: Restoring and maintaining biodiversity in a changing world is increasingly
 challenging due to the competing needs of species for suitable space and
 resources. One ecosystem that has seen considerable anthropogenic changes
 in extent and structure is the longleaf pine (Pinus palustris) ecosystem.
 Understanding how wildlife responds to restoration is important to
 informing forest restoration and conservation. We monitored game birds and
 mid-large-sized mammal occupancy in and around hardwood patches embedded
 within a longleaf pine woodland at The Jones Center at Ichauway in Newton,
 GA. We found that 11 species use the transition zone between the longleaf
 pine and hardwood hammocks. Gray squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis),
 Virginia opossums (Didelphis virginiana), nine-banded armadillos (Dasypus
 novemcinctus) occupancy increased along the gradient while and fox
 squirrel (Sciurus niger) declined. Our results suggest that oak patches
 and transitional zones are important to maintaining biodiversity within
 the longleaf pine ecosystem.
description: Study Area We monitored wildlife in and
 around five hardwood patches at The Jones Center at Ichauway in Newton, GA
 (Figure 1). The Jones Center at Ichauway is a 12,000-ha property managed
 for conservation and scientific research. At the time of our study,
 Ichauway was comprised of a range of ecological communities which included
 stands of longleaf, slash (<em>P. elliottil</em>), and
 loblolly pine (<em>P. taeda</em>), as well as mixed pine
 hardwoods, riparian hardwood forests, depressional wetlands, and
 shrub-scrub uplands. Over 7,000 ha of the property was open canopy upland
 pine-grassland vegetation comprised of second-generation longleaf pine and
 managed with frequent prescribed fire and silviculture, which included
 removal of ‘off site’ hardwoods. Less common on the property were closed
 canopy hardwood patches composed of a diverse array of oak species
 including <em>Quercus incana, Q. falcata, Q. laevis, Q. stellata, Q.
 virginiana, </em>and<em> Q. hemisphaerica</em> (Jacqmain
 et al. 1999; Loudermilk et al. 2013). The hard transitions from open
 canopy pine to closed canopy hardwood hammocks occurring at The Jones
 Center provide excellent conditions to investigate the role of oak
 hammocks in other longleaf and open pine systems.
 Animal activity We randomly selected five
 4–10-ha hardwood patches in the northern sector of the Jones Center to
 monitor with camera traps (Fig 1A). Within each patch, we then randomly
 selected four points along the edge to center a perpendicular transect of
 cameras; we placed transects at least 25 m apart to improve independence.
 To investigate how animals respond to the edge at a fine scale we placed a
 camera 10 m into the longleaf pine, one at the patch edge, and one 10 m
 into the hardwood patch (Fig 1B). At each camera location, we assessed
 visual obstruction using a modified Robel pole (Robel et al. 1970; Sovie
 et al. 2016). We installed each camera 50cm above the ground and angled it
 towards a bait pile of pecans and cracked corn (Greene et al. 2016). We
 deployed cameras in each patch five times with each deployment lasting
 10–15 days and replaced bait every 5 days. We stopped collecting community
 composition data in two of the patches after two deployments because we
 manipulated gray squirrels for a related study (Sovie et al. 2021). We
 programmed cameras to take three photos every time the camera was tripped
 using the camera’s normal sensitivity setting and rest for 3 minutes
 between bursts. We considered photos of animals of the same species taken
 &gt;20mins apart as independent observations (Greene et al. 2016). We
 treated camera failure as missing data (Foster & Harmsen 2012) and
 assumed failures were randomly distributed and do not affect our analysis
 (Little & Rubin 2014). We followed the American Society of
 Mammologists guidelines (Sikes et al. 2016) for studying mammals. The
 University of Florida Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC)
 approved our study (Protocol #:
 201709855).                                                     
 Data Analysis We visually identified species
 in pictures and extracted metadata (date/time) from each photograph. We
 produced detection history matrices for each camera based on a sampling
 occasion of five days (0 = species not detected; 1 = species detected; NA
 = inactive sampling unit or occasion). We collapsed our detection data to
 5-day sessions to reduce the complexity of the detection matrix and
 improve model performance (Nichols et al., 2008).