Yooper Wildlife Watch

Marquette Urban-wildland Interface

The Upper Peninsula (UP) of Michigan is home to a diverse wildlife community comprised of gray wolf, black bear, fox, fisher, marten, mink, river otter, abundant deer, raccoons, red squirrels, and many other mammals and diverse avian species. Diverse wildlife in the UP are supported by the varied land cover across the region that includes deciduous, conifer, and mixed forests, swamps, meadows, and a substantial shoreline along Lake Superior. Marquette, MI is the largest urban center in the UP and a popular destination for recreation enthusiasts. For example, surrounded by numerous public access lands that support diverse recreation activities including camping, mountain biking, hiking, skiing, snow biking, snowmobiling, four-wheeling, berry/mushroom harvesting, hunting, fishing, and rock climbing, Marquette is a vacation destination for tourists year-round. As such, the Marquette urban-wildland interface is an excellent system in which to evaluate how seasonal variation in human recreation activities influences wildlife spatial and temporal activity patterns.

Conservation Importance

As outdoor recreation enthusiasts flock to Marquette to engage in myriad activities across diverse public access lands along the urban-wildland interface, understanding how wildlife respond to seasonal variation in human recreation activities is critical for ensuring human-wildlife co-existence across this region. As such, Yooper Wildlife Watch goals include:

• Identify the different wildlife species occupying the urban-wildland interface;

• Examine what landscape features (e.g., land cover type [deciduous forest], roads) are associated with species-specific detection and occupancy across the urban-wildland interface (i.e., wildlife-habitat associations);

• Index seasonal variation in human presence and recreation type (e.g., hunting, hiking, biking) across the urban-wildland interface; and

• Assess the spatial and temporal responses of wildlife, particularly carnivores, to seasonal differences in human recreation patterns across the urban-wildland interface.