The Influence of Management Practice on the Snakes in Forest Food Webs
This presentation will include research associated with the publication “The Influence of Management Practice on the Snakes in Forest Food Webs.” Researchers investigated the effects of frequency of forest management on the trophic structure and resource use of snake communities in two pine forests under high and low frequencies of management (i.e., shorter fire return intervals and thinning versus longer fire return intervals and limited thinning). They sampled snakes, prey, and dominant basal resources across each site for three summers from 2018 to 2020. Using stable isotope analysis, they compared community-wide metrics of trophic structure and generated isotopic mixing models to determine the relative contribution of resources to snake consumers.
