Comparative spatially explicit approach for testing effects of soil chemicals on terrestrial wildlife bioindicator demographics.

Wildlife species are often used as bioindicators to evaluate the extent and severity of environmental contamination and the effectiveness of remediation practices. A common approach for investigating population- or community-level impacts on bioindicators compares demographic parameter estimates (e.g.

Investigating effects of soil chemicals on density of small mammal bioindicators using spatial capture-recapture models.

Monitoring the ecological impacts of environmental pollution and the effectiveness of remediation efforts requires identifying relationships between contaminants and the disruption of biological processes in populations, communities, or ecosystems. Wildlife are useful bioindicators, but traditional comparative experimental approaches rely on a staunch and typically unverifiable assumption that, in the absence of contaminants, reference and contaminated sites would support the same densities of bioindicators, thereby inferring direct causation from indirect data. We demonstrate the utility of spatial capture-recapture (SCR) models for overcoming these issues, testing if community density of common small mammal bioindicators was directly influenced by soil chemical concentrations.