Using spaceborne LiDAR to reveal drivers of animal demography

Remote sensing can provide continuous spatiotemporal information about vegetation to inform wildlife habitat estimates, but these methods are often limited in availability or lack adequate resolution to capture the three-dimensional vegetative details critical for understanding habitat. The Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) is a spaceborne light detection and ranging system (LiDAR) that has revolutionized the availability of high-quality three-dimensional vegetation measurements of the Earth's temperate and tropical forests. To date, wildlife-related applications of GEDI data or GEDI-fusion products have been limited to estimate species habitat use, distribution, and diversity. Here, our goal was to expand the use of GEDI-based applications to wildlife demography by evaluating if GEDI data fusions could aid in characterizing demographic parameters of wildlife. We leveraged a recently published dataset of GEDI-fusion forest structures and capture-mark-recapture data to estimate the density and survival of two small mammal species, Humboldt's flying squirrel (Glaucomys oregonensis) and Townsend's chipmunk (Neotamias townsendii), from three studies in western Oregon spanning 2014-2021. We used capture histories in Huggins robust design models to estimate apparent annual survival and density as a derived parameter. We found strong support that both flying squirrel and chipmunk density were associated with GEDI-fusion forest structures of foliage height diversity and plant area volume density in the 5-10 m strata for flying squirrels and proportionately higher plant area volume density in the 0-20 m strata for chipmunks, as well as other spatiotemporal factors such as elevation. We found weak support that apparent annual survival was associated with GEDI-fusion forest structures for flying squirrels but not for chipmunks. We demonstrate further utility of these methods by creating spatially explicit density maps of both species that could aid management and conservation policies. Our work represents a novel application of GEDI data to evaluate wildlife demography and produce continuous spatially explicit density predictions for these species. We conclude that aspects of small mammal demography can be explained by forest structure as characterized via GEDI data fusions.