Habitat Relations Informing Management of Endemic Habitat Specialists: Multiscale Habitat Selection by the Red Hills Salamander DAVID A. STEEN, 1,2 Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA JAMES C. GODWIN, Alabama Natural Heritage Program, Environmental Institute, Auburn University, AL 36849, USA CHRISTOPHER J. W. MCCLURE, Department of Biology, Boise State University, Boise, ID 83725, USA MICHAEL BARBOUR, Alabama Natural Heritage Program, Environmental Institute, Auburn University, AL 36849, USA ABSTRACT Rare species with highly specific habitat requirements present challenges for land managers. The primarily fossorial Red Hills salamander (Phaeognathus hubrichti) is endemic to a small area in south- central Alabama and restricted to a unique coastal plain slope and ravine habitat. Both the current distribution and population demography of the species are thought to be influenced by past and current land use. We quantified habitat use and selection of P. hubrichti at 6 scales: 3 of which were designed to identify habitat attributes at the landscape scale, the remaining were designed to identify habitat attributes at the microhabitat scale. We documented habitat selection at all 6 spatial scales. Because the data best explained habitat selection at the smallest spatial scale that we evaluated, we advocate for an approach to P. hubrichti habitat management and restoration that begins at a fine spatial scale but incorporates management goals at multiple and larger scales. The framework we use for quantifying habitat selection of P. hubrichti may be useful for other rare species with narrow ranges and specific habitat requirements. Ó 2014 The Wildlife Society. KEY WORDS Alabama, amphibian, conservation, Phaeognathus hubrichti, Red Hills salamander. A species may be considered rare based on its highly specific habitat requirements, small distributional range, or low population densities (Rabinowitz 1981). Effective manage- ment and conservation is particularly important for these species because they are likely at high risk for population extirpations and extinctions (Hunter 1996), especially when habitats are fragmented and dispersal ability is limited. For species that fulfill all of these criteria, management plans have little room for error. In the absence of controlled and experimental studies, which can be logistically infeasible for rare species, management and restoration plans should be based on a species’ natural history; for example, habitat management goals and desired conditions should be informed by the scale(s) that the species selects its habitat. However, some common methods of determining habitat use and selection do not necessarily generate this information. Specifically, habitat selection for many species is often quantified from data derived from assessments using radiotelemetry. Radio- telemetry studies offer evidence of habitat preference by individual animals when animal locations are compared to random locations. On the other hand, for many species, our knowledge of habitat selection is based primarily on qualitative characterizations of sites where that species occurs. Both strategies overlook the possibility that a given site is used or selected by a species because of landscape-scale habitat features that are not apparent without quantitatively comparing occupied sites to random sites across the landscape (e.g., Steen et al. 2012). Conservation or management plans defining habitat quality based solely on intra-site habitat features may either overlook potentially high-quality sites containing degraded habitat or consider a site as high-quality although the surrounding landscape makes that site unsuitable. This consideration is often cited for animals associated with wetlands within a terrestrial matrix (Findlay and Houlahan 1997, Naugle et al. 2000, Roe et al. 2003); however, the same is likely to be true for species highly associated with specific features of the terrestrial landscape. On the other hand, habitat quality for some species could be based largely on microhabitat features with little consideration for landscape features. In these cases, conservation plans need not be as concerned about where efforts occur, because any site is likely to become high- quality habitat when site-specific habitat features are managed. Finally, habitat use for many species is based on a combination of habitat selection at multiple scales (e.g., McClure et al. 2012), likely because habitat quality at 1 scale Received: 5 February 2013; Accepted: 24 December 2013 Published: 25 March 2014 1 E-mail: davidasteen@gmail.com 2 Present address: Alabama Natural Heritage Program, Environmental Institute, Auburn University, AL 36849, USA The Journal of Wildlife Management 78(3):463–470; 2014; DOI: 10.1002/jwmg.678 Steen et al.  Red Hills Salamander Habitat Selection 463