John A. Bissonette

For the most updated publications and activities see my CV

AREAS OF SPECIALIZATION

Landscape ecology, terrestrial vertebrates, wildlife habitat and population response, ungulates,
population consequences of disturbance regimes, mustelids, marten, wildlife management, road ecology

Utah Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit Annual Report 2007 Annual Report 2008

NCHRP Report 615. Evaluation of the Use and Effectiveness of Wildlife Crossings. Final Report 2008

Also available as a download at: http://www.trb.org/news/blurb_detail.asp?id=9369

STATEWIDE EXCLOSURE DATABASE FOR UTAH

Click to see the final report dated 30 September 2004 for the statewide Utah Exclosures Project funded by the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management and conducted by Bill Adair and I at the USGS Utah Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit. We have prepared it as a short and concise, but thorough explanation of the current situation of exclosures statewide. We have given recommendations for improvement if this database is to be of maximum usefulness. We have provided 4 appendices that give all pertinent data regarding the exclosures database. Appendix I “Database Design Objectives and Methodology” and Appendix II “Business Rules and Validation Data” provide background data regarding how the database was developed and the decisions we made to construct the Access database. Appendix III is the Exclosure Inventory Master Table with summary information for all 1,013 exclosures, while Appendix IV “Summary Tables” provides in 26 tables summary data for ease of understanding the patterns exhibited by the exclosure data. It was an enormous effort with over 14,000 scanned documents (>7.5 Gigabytes) covering 1,013 exclosures statewide in Utah . The scanned documents are included on 18 CDs that have been transmitted to the Salt Lake offices of the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources and the BLM and to the Ogden Office of the USFS. Bill Adair (Post Doctoral Student) and I have provided the body of the report plus the four appendices on this site for your reading. Please take time to read the report.

CONTENTS

The UT Exclosure Inventory database includes 18 CDs. The CD contents are compressed files with a .zip extension. The folders are large. You will need either a computer with lots of space and speed, or lots of patience.

HOTSPOTS OF DEER-VEHICLE CRASHES IN UTAH

Click here to see the final report dated 11 May 2005

In this report, we identify a total of 183 deer mortality hotspots. We defined a hotspot as a segment of road in which each mile had 11 or more collisions occur within it over 11 years. Core hotspots averaged 5.3 miles in length; all isolated hotspots were 1 mile in length. Hotspot collisions were concentrated; 57.74% of all collisions occurred within a cumulative, ~1001 km (622 mi), range, or 10.5% of total analyzed highway miles (~9,500 total km, ~5,900 mi). We provide data on the 51 routes that include the hotspots we identified.

We identified data issues with typical highway department data (PDF) and also calculated the costs of wildlife-vehicle accidents in Utah. PDF