Mammals

Large carnivores like cougars, wolves and bears, are further examples of area-sensitive species. These animals normally provide important controls on populations of deer and the smaller predators, which can otherwise become too numerous and destructive. The big predators are part of the natural heritage of the region, and have been a critical force in the evolutionary history of the ecosystem. Conservation biologists argue that a regional plan that does not include the large native carnivores is incomplete (Noss and Cooperider, 1994).

Black bears are one example of an interior forest-dependent, large omnivore. Scientists studying the habitat requirements of black bears highlight their need for the availability of abundant mature oaks (greater than 100 years) to provide a staple food: acorns (Pelton, 1986). In addition, bears require healthy old growth forests (a minimum of 5 to 10%) distributed throughout their range (Pelton, 1986), and low road densities (less than 0.5 kilometers of road per square kilometer of forest) (Brody, 1984). Protecting habitat for bears and other "charismatic megafauna" requires management of forest resources at a landscape scale--and thereby provides habitat for a wide variety of interior forest species, incuding those that are almost never monitored or even observed by human visitors to the forest.

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