Spatial ecology of black-tailed prairie dog colonies and testing predation risk as a tool for managing colony expansion

Black-tailed prairie dogs (BTPD) are considered a keystone species owing to their marked influence on the physical structure, biological diversity, and ecosystem-level functions of North American grassland and shrub-steppe habitats. Yet, BTPD’s burrowing behaviors and colonial social structure can lead to human-wildlife conflict, particularly in areas where livestock grazing occurs. As a result, BTPD populations have been reduced to just 2% of their historic range owing to a combination of large-scale eradication efforts, habitat loss, and disease outbreaks. A variety of methods are used to manage and control BTPD colonies. Often, this consists of poisoning individuals that are in undesirable areas. Although effective, poisoning is time-consuming, expensive, and can negate conservation efforts to maintain or grow BTPD populations. Non-invasive and/or non-lethal management alternatives are therefore needed to help managers balance conservation goals while reducing conflict. One potential solution is to manipulate BTPD behavior by increasing real or perceived predation risk in targeted locations (e.g., raptor poles, predator scent). Conducting experiments to test the use of predation risk as a natural, non-invasive means to manipulate BTDP colonies would provide a more in-depth exploration of alternative management tools to limit the expansion of BTPD colonies into undesirable areas.  However, information on how colonies are connected across a landscape, and where and why colonies expand or recolonize unoccupied locations, is necessary for successful BTPD conservation and conflict mitigation. Proactive management actions (e.g., raptor poles) are challenging to deploy without knowing why colonies expand or where dispersers originate from when recolonizing extirpated colonies. Landscape features (e.g., terrain), colony attributes (e.g., distance), disease occurrence, and land use practices might influence connectivity between colonies and the spatial patterns of colony dynamics, like expansion, and questions remain about where and why colony expansion is likely to occur, where the primary movement corridors connecting individual colonies are, and what facilitates movement between colonies.  Characterizing and understanding these relationships would help guide future BTPD conservation and management decisions.