Abstract
The white stork demands large areas of high quality habitat to sustain. Preferred habitats are wetlands and non-cultivated grasslands. In a good stork habitat, a plethora of more or less threatened species exists. The stork enhances the interest of the general public for wetland conservation issues, and its reintroduction may therefore benefit many other species, too. In the proposed project I intend to construct a predictive habitat distribution model for the storks in southern Sweden. The model will relate the habitat use and reproductive success of the storks, to habitat characteristics in a GIS database. I will develop the model using data on the storks present in 2002-2004, and will verify it using the storks released in 2005-2006. As the habitat data (farmland habitat classifications and Landsat satellite imagery) are available for the whole potential breeding range of storks in Sweden, predictions on available stork habitat can be made for this range. Thus, it will be possible to estimate the total sustainable breeding population of storks in Sweden. The stork habitat identified with the model will also be valuable for many other wetland organisms, and hence the model can be used to direct conservation and restoration efforts.
Sweden