Authored by: Chandler Strickland
Edits by: Pierce Young
What are limiting factors?
Limiting factors are the parameters that can affect population growth.
As land managers it is important to evaluate what your property may be deficient in for the wildlife species that are being managed. Understanding the limiting factor on your hunting property is key to enhancing wildlife habitat, optimizing the health of wildlife populations, and improving hunting opportunities.
Dependent vs. Independent Factors:
Limiting factors can be dependent or independent. Dependent factors, such as resources, predation, or parasites and disease, are influenced (dependent) on population density. Otherwise, independent factors, like weather or human disturbance, are not influenced by population density. Understanding what what your limiting factors are, and if they can be mitigated for, can help you in managing the wildlife on your property.
Examples of limiting factors:
Perhaps your property, and the surrounding landscape, is limited in early successional habitat such bedding cover, nesting/brood rearing areas, or natural browse. Thinning timber and opening areas on your property to be maintained with fire or strip disking can help promote early succession that wildlife species need. However, if these resources are lot limited, adding more may not be what your focus needs to be on.
Another limiting factor could be available food resources whether in amount, or quality, at important times of the year. Planting forages year-round that are nutritional for wildlife, or managing the forest understory with prescribed fire for native forage can help increase these resources. However, increasing food plot size or increasing soil health (which are good practices) may not mitigate for the limiting factor if you only planted food plots in Fall, and did not consider Spring or Summer forage.
Providing adequate year-round forage and cover is important to managing for any wildlife species, but if the populations are not managed to within what the area can sustain, the population will keep exceeding any extra inputs you provide. In this case the limiting factor would be population management.
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Managing for the limiting factors on your property is the quickest way to produce see larger gains through wildlife management and get you closer to reaching the goals you have for wildlife on your property.
To better help understand what your limiting factor may be on your property, visit our website and request a free site visit from one of our private lands biologists