Manuel Silva
Texas Tech University
Master’s Candidate in the Department of Natural Resources Management. Program: Wildlife, Aquatics, and Wildlands Science and Management
Influence of Woody Vegetation Patterns on Scaled Quail Demographics
My name is Manuel Silva and I am originally from Lubbock Texas. I grew up on a small ranch just outside of Lubbock, and the ranch is where I developed a passion for the outdoors. It wasn’t until after my service in the Marine Corps that I gained a passion for hunting. My enthusiasm for hunting grew into an obsession with wildlife management and conservation. My experience as an Undergraduate research technician helped prepare me for my current research project in which I will be working to quantify the fundamental processes influencing scaled quail population dynamics to establish land management practices that will significantly improve habitat and enhance scaled quail populations.
This project is a collaboration between Texas Tech, the Quail-Tech Alliance, and Texas State University. Our current study area includes 6 ranches throughout the Rolling Plains 3 with stable populations and 3 with intermittent populations. I will be assessing winter survival, habitat selection, and landscape ecology in relation to weather patterns, vegetation structure etc., minimum habitat patch size requirement, and comparing amount of woody cover selected between stable and intermittent sites. We hope to find the threshold at which woody vegetation becomes too dense for scaled quail to use.
