Pronghorn Sheldon-Hart Mountain Herd

The Sheldon-Hart Mountain pronghorn (Antilocapra americana) herd is part of a large interstate metapopulation distributed across northwest Nevada, southeast Oregon, and portions of northeast California. Some animals travel up to 100 miles between summer and winter ranges and traverse multiple federal land jurisdictions, including the Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge, Hart Mountain National Wildlife Refuge, and surrounding Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands. The herd can be characterized as conditionally or partially migratory with approximately 65% of collared animals exhibiting migratory tendencies. Major summer ranges include portions of the Hart Mountain Wildlife Refuge, Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge, and northern Black Rock Range in Nevada. Winter ranges are distributed across Hart Mountain and east to Catlow Valley, Sage Hen Flats in Oregon and portions of the Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge including Catnip Mountain, Gooch Table, Rock Springs Table, Summit Lake Indian Reservation, northern Calico Mountains. Challenges to this herd include invasive annual grasses and loss of native shrubs and grasslands, depletion of limited water resources due to severe droughts, and livestock fencing that prohibits efficient movements across the landscape. These data provide the location of winter ranges for female Pronghorn in the Sheldon-Hart Mountain herd in Nevada and Oregon. They were developed from 58 sequences collected from a sample size of 31 animals comprising GPS locations collected every 5-6 hours. This dataset was derived from three separate datasets for the Sheldon–Hart Mountain herd obtained via ScienceBase: Winter Range, Stopovers, and Corridors. Due to the need to merge these datasets for visualization purposes, several fields were standardized to account for discrepancies among the source datasets. For example, the original corridor and winter range datasets contained only a field named “GRIDCODE,” while the stopover dataset contained a single attribute field named “layer.” For consistency, the “GRIDCODE” field was preserved during the merge, and the stopover feature was assigned a null value for this field. The “layer” field from the stopover dataset was removed. Additionally, most pronghorn datasets available on ScienceBase contain the fields “Contour” and “DataType.” For clarity and consistency with these datasets, both fields were added to the Sheldon–Hart Mountain herd dataset. The “DataType” field contains values of winter range, stopover, and corridor. The “Contour” field was populated with the values winter range, low, medium, or high based on corresponding “GRIDCODE” values of 0.5, 1, 10, and 20, respectively. A “Species” field was also included for uniformity. Attributes (not all field definitions may be listed): ────────┬───┬──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── GRIDCODE│ │We delineated low, medium and high-level corridors from population level utilization distributions of animal movements. ────────┼───┼──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── │1 │This represents the low use corridor or the 99% population level footprint of the combined animal utilization distributions. ────────┼───┼──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── │10 │This represents the medium use corridor or the combined animal UD for 10% or more of the population level corridor. ────────┼───┼──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── │20 │This represents the high use corridor or the combined animal UD for 20% or more of the population level corridor. ────────┼───┼──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── │0.5│Percentile of winter range utilization distribution ────────┴───┴────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────