The associations of wildlife richness indices and its components

The effi cient conservation and management of game animals often requires that species interactions are taken into account when planning actions. For over a decade, the monitoring of game animals in Finland has been seeking a broader scope, where the focus is on the community level in addition to a more traditional approach focusing on the separate species. The basic concept for this new approach is the wildlife richness, which describes the well-being of a set of game animals that are typical to the Finnish fauna and share strong ecological, social, economical and cultural values for the eco-social system.

Practical applications based on the concept are Wildlife Richness Indices (WRIs). These indices are calculated for grid units based on the abundance information about 16 species, collected by carrying out wildlife triangle censuses (Fig. 1). The 16 species favour different living habitats and successive stages of forests. These species represent different trophic levels: toppredators, predators and their preys. The purpose of this article is to describe the spatial and temporal associations between each of these species and the WRI covering another 15 species, and between species groups (i.e. guilds) and the WRI covering other groups.

The results demonstrate how strongly the species and species groups are interlinked to the WRIs as members of local animal communities. They also show how similarly the abundance of the species varies. The similarity pattern was most evident in the northern part of Finland, where the communities are generally not as diverse as in the southern parts. The most abundant species in terms of tracks index in census lines – prey species (mountain hare and red squirrel) and predators (red fox) – showed the highest positive associations with the WRIs both spatially and temporally. In contrast, the spatial and temporal pattern of willow grouse deviated slightly from the WRI comprised of the other 15 species. The results also show how strongly the ompositions of the spatial WRI vary from region to region.