| Besides providing habitat to the grizzly bear, the Rocky Mountain Foothills of Alberta include considerable seismic oil and gas exploration. Seismic cutlines have long been introduced to this landscape, however their effects on habitat structure and on landscape use of grizzly bears remained yet to be quantified.;Using high resolution, panchromatic IRS satellite imagery, seismic cutlines were mapped inside the Foothills Model Forest Grizzly Bear Research Project Area south of Hinton, Alberta with an overall accuracy of 88%. The impacts of cutline densities on grizzly bear habitat structure were measured using landscape metrics meaningful for the distribution of grizzly bears. Principal Component Analysis was used to identify the parsimonious set of landscape metrics required to describe and quantify the spatial pattern of the foothills landscape.;Seismic cutline densities directly affect four out of five investigated landscape metrics (edge density, mean patch size, mean nearest neighbour, and coefficient of variation in mean nearest neighbour). Cutline densities and landscape structure were also related to grizzly bear landscape use using Poisson family Generalized Linear Models. While seismic cutlines do not directly predict grizzly bear landscape use, the habitat structures they create are important predictors of grizzly bear landscape use. |
