Assessing the impact of forest fragmentation due to natural gas development on wild turkey nesting success in Van Buren County, Arkansas

Natural gas exploration and production has caused large scale changes to portions of the Arkansas landscape. Well pad site construction, access roads, and pipelines utilized to extract and transport natural gas have fragmented forested areas. The forest fragmentation resulting from these rapid changes could be contributing to the documented decline in nesting success of the wild turkey (Meleagris gallopavo). This study quantified temporal changes in forest fragmentation in terms of the number of forest patches, mean forest patch area, and forest edge length. The correlation between these fragmentation variables and nesting success data was explored to test the hypotheses of this study that 1) the number of forest patches is negatively correlated to nesting success, that 2) forest patch size is positively correlated to nesting success, and that 3) forest edge habitat length is negatively correlated to nesting success. There were 838 wells added within Van Buren County during the years 2000 through 2009. These wells resulted in a total forest loss of about 1.5% area from the initial inventory of forest in 2000. Pearson product moment correlation (PPMC) values ranging from -0.19 to 0.17 suggests relationships exist between poults per hen and forest fragmentation due to natural gas development. These PPMC values and their respective directions confirm the hypothesis. However, their p-values were all greater than 0.5 which suggests the correlations may not be statistically significant. A stronger regression model, giving adjusted R squared value of 0.766, was constructed which takes into account annual precipitation, previous year's wild turkey harvest, along with the number of conifer forest patches. This study concludes that the low wild turkey nesting success may not be directly influenced by forests lost due to natural gas development within the study area Van Buren County Arkansas.