Wildlife Community Occurrence, Activity Patterns, and Interspecific Interactions in Response to Energy Developmen

Energy extraction is one of the primary drivers of land use change in North America, particularly oil and gas development, which is projected to increase by 40% over the next 20 years. Such human-mediated landscape changes can have direct affects to wildlife including impeding or disrupting movement patterns, decreasing habitat suitability, changing individual behaviors, and altering population and community structure. Carnivores, which are vital to a healthy ecosystem, are thought to be particularly vulnerable to habitat modifications because of their naturally occurring low densities, large ranges, and aversion to areas with high human activity. My dissertation focused on the distribution of the carnivore community and their prey in relation to energy extraction features in the Piceance Basin of northwest Colorado, one of the largest natural-gas reserves in North America.;The effects of anthropogenic disturbance on predator-prey relationships are fundamental to ecology, yet less well understood. Therefore, in Chapter 1, we investigated the relationship between predation sites, energy infrastructure, and natural landscape features across contiguous areas experiencing different degrees of energy extraction during periods of high and low intensity development. We determined where predation events occurred for fawn and adult female mule deer from 2008--2014 in critical winter range with extensive energy development. We contrast spatial correlates of 286 mortality locations with random landscape locations and mule deer distribution estimated from 350,000 GPS locations. We estimated predation risk with resource selection functions and latent selection difference functions. Relative to the distribution of mule deer, predation risk was lower closer to pipelines and well pads, but higher closer to roads. Predation sites occurred more than expected relative to availability and deer distribution in deeper snow and non-forested habitats. Anthropogenic features had a greater influence on predation sites during the period of low activity than high activity, and natural landscape characteristics had weaker effects relative to anthropogenic features throughout the study. Though canids accounted for the majority of predation events, felids exhibited stronger landscape associations, driving the observed spatial patterns in predation risk to mule deer. The emergence of varied interactions between predation and landscape features across contexts and years highlights the complexity of interspecific interactions in highly modified landscapes.;Assessing the degree to which animals behaviorally respond post disturbance can also help identify activities of concern or populations at risk. In chapter 2, we examined circadian activity patterns of bobcats, coyotes, mule deer, elk, lagomorphs, and rodents during crepuscular, day, and night periods using data captured from 40 remote cameras distributed across a 162 km2 area with starkly different levels of current and historical energy development. During the winter of 2015-2016, we obtained 3,067 independent detections from 7,185 camera days of our six target species. In mixed support of our hypotheses, bobcats, coyotes, and mule deer were less active during the day in the developed site compared to the undeveloped site, as were rodents which was unexpected. In contrast, elk and lagomorphs did not show differences across sites. Bobcats demonstrated the greatest reduction in diurnal activity, with nearly three times less activity in the developed site. Coyotes and mule deer appeared to compensate for reduced activity during the day by increasing their activity during other periods, though bobcats did not. The mammal species captured in this study demonstrated strong differentiation in their plasticity and sensitivity to energy development approximately four years post high-intensity disturbance, which likely influences their susceptibility to human-driven landscape changes.;In Chapter 3, we examined the effects of energy development on carnivore communities occurrence from 2014-2017. With data collected from 80 remote triggered cameras across a ~300 km2 area, we estimated cougar, bobcat, and coyote habitat use with single-species multiseason occupancy modeling. Top models indicated a higher occurrence of bobcats and coyotes at low well pad densities, though there was large uncertainty in our estimates at high well pad densities. Coyote occurrence was higher in low elevation areas, and bobcats had a greater probability of occurrence in woodland than in shrub covered camera stations. Across seasons, coyote occurrence and probability of detection were high and 1.5 and 2 times that of bobcats, respectively. The occurrence of bobcats was comparable to that observed in exurban development, but lower than in populations that experience little human persecution. Only two detections of cougars were obtained across the three winter seasons, preventing occupancy estimation. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.).