Elk Southern Owyhee Desert Herd

The Southern Owyhee Desert elk herd follows an east-to-west migration pattern, which is unique for Nevada, where migration routes for many ungulate herds follow mountain ranges from the north to the south. A few low use corridors cross Nevada State Route 789, but several medium and high use corridors intersect Nevada State Route 226 and Interstate 11. The most commonly used winter range is in the southern boundary of the Owyhee Desert, but some individuals migrate longer distances to winter in the Little Humboldt River Study Area, which is more varied topographically but has a similar winter range vegetation community. Overall, conversion of habitat from woody to herbaceous plants has benefitted elk in this herd and elsewhere in Nevada. Growth for this herd is limited by an annual pulse in spring mortality, which is approximately 20–40 percent of elk each year (C. McKee, Nevada Department of Wildlife, written commun., 2023). Antlerless elk hunts were stopped in 2022, and since then population growth is stable to slightly increasing (T. Allen, Nevada Department of Wildlife, written commun., 2023). This layer's data were collected as part of a project conducted between 2015 and 2022. This dataset was derived from three separate datasets for the Southern Owyhee Desert herd obtained via ScienceBase: Winter Range, Stopovers, and Corridors. Due to the need to merge these datasets for visualization purposes, the “Contour” field was standardized to account for discrepancies among the source datasets. Rather than retaining numeric values (e.g., 10 and 50) in the “Contour” field, stopover features were assigned the value “stopover,” and winter range features were assigned the value “winter range.” This change was made because the “Contour” field is used across elk datasets for symbology and legend labeling, and these values are more easily interpreted at a glance. For an explanation of the original contour values of 10 and 50 for stopover and winter range, respectively, see the attribute definitions table ───────┬────────────┬────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Contour│ │We delineated low, medium and high-level corridors from population level utilization distributions of animal movements. ───────┼────────────┼────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── │Stopover │Stopovers were defined as the areas representing the highest 10 percent of use from the mean population-level UD. ───────┼────────────┼────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── │Winter Range│Winter range is defined by the top 50% of the values (area) during winter season between fall and spring migrations. ───────┼────────────┼────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── │Low │This represents the "low use" corridor or the footprint used by at least one individual. ───────┼────────────┼────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── │Medium │This value represents the "medium use" corridor or the combined animal utilization distributions for 10–20% of the sampled population. ───────┼────────────┼────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── │High │This value represents the "high use" corridor or the combined animal utilization distributions for >20% of sampled population. ───────┴────────────┴──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────