Researchers recently found that Maine's only native rabbit, the New England Cottontail, has been slowly disappearing over the past decade. Now experts are fighting to restore this endangered species' habitat, an action that they believe will keep the rabbits around for years to come.
"The New England cottontail is a species of great conservation concern in the Northeast. This is our only native rabbit and is an integral component of the native New England wildlife. Maintaining biodiversity gives resilience to our landscape and ecosystems," Adrienne Kovach, a researcher with the New Hampshire Agriculture Experiment Station (NHAES) said in a recent statement.
According to Kovach, ecologists have actually known that cottontail populations in New England have been declining for decades, but in this past 10 years alone that decline shot up to nearly 50 percent.
NHAES research reveals that this is largely due to reduction and fragmentation of the rabbits habitats. Road and housing projects commonly break apart once whole habitats, fragmenting them into smaller more isolated regions.
This habitat isolation hurts the cottontail populations, which would traditionally send thier children away to start new families elsewhere to mingle genes.
"We have found that it is increasingly difficult for Maine and New Hampshire cottontails to travel the large distances between fragmented habitats necessary to maintain gene flow among populations of cottontail," Kovach explained.
He also adds that cottontail habitats naturally decline, maturing into thick forests if natural forest fire and forest rebirth cycles are disrupted.
"Cottontails require thicketed habitats, which progress from old fields to young forests. Once you have a more mature forest, the cottontail habitat is reduced."
Encouragingly, the NHAES research has shown that man-made regions such as power-line right of ways and the sides of rail-ways serve as ideal cottontail habitats. According to Kovach, making use of the regions and helping them develop into ideal grounds for the rabbits could help.
"If we can... work on creating a landscape that has a mosaic of different habitats, including mature forests and young forests, we know that it is going to help a lot of species."
A study detailing these findings was published in the journal Ecology and Evolution.