Development and use of a habitat gradient model to evaluate wildlife habitat

Ecologists and wildlife managers are increasingly confronted with the problems of predicting the value of surface cover as wildlife habitat and developing management alternatives to offset wildlife values lost because of land-use change. These problems have become urgent and more acute because of increased demand for products from the land and diminished fiscal and manpower resources for obtaining meaningful environmental information for the decision maker. This paper describes a relatively rapid, simple, and quantitative process for evaluating the quality of an area as wildlife habitat.