Factors affecting lifetime reproduction, long-term territory-specific reproduction, and estimation of habitat quality in northern goshawks.

One measure of habitat quality is a species' demographic performance in a habitat and the gold standard metric of performance is reproduction. Such a measure, however, may be misleading if individual quality is a fitness determinant. We report on factors affecting lifetime reproduction (LR), the total number of lifetime fledglings produced by an individual, and long-term territory-specific reproduction in a multi-generational study of northern goshawks (Accipiter gentilis).

Post-fledging survival of northern goshawks: the importance of prey abundance, weather, and dispersal.

Effective wildlife conservation strategies require an understanding of how fluctuating environmental conditions affect sensitive life stages. As part of a long-term study, we examined post-fledging and post-independence survival of 89 radio-marked juvenile Northern Goshawks (Accipiter gentilis) produced from 48 nests in northern Arizona, USA, during 1998-2001. Information-theoretic methods were used to examine within- and among-year variation in survival relative to environmental (prey abundance, weather), territory (hatching date, brood size), and individual (gender, body mass) sources of variation.