A Comparison of the Effects of Habitat Type and Human Influence on Occupancy of Freshwater Turtles in the Mississippi Embayment

Abstract

Freshwater turtles are highly diverse in the southeastern United States, yet few studies document how diversity is distributed in agricultural and rural landscapes. Furthermore, most previous work did not compare distributions between pond and river habitats with potential differences in selective pressures. We surveyed 64 sites in the Mississippi embayment and evaluated how surrounding land use, road density, and habitat type affected species' occupancy with a focus on Macrochelys temminckii. We observed that turtles were less likely to occur in locations surrounded by high road density. We observed variation in species' responses to agricultural land-use that partially depended on preferences for lotic habitat. M. temminckii were rare and negatively affected by road density and unassociated with agricultural land-use. Variation among species can likely be attributed to differences in species traits, but more studies evaluating land-use effects on species occupying lentic versus lotic habitats could create more effective conservation strategies.

Keywords

agriculture / community / habitat partitioning / lentic / lotic

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