Mule Deer Southeast Herd

Most of the Southeast mule deer herd winters along the Owyhee River in regions containing sagebrush communities and Columbia Basin grassland mixed with non-native annual grasslands. These mule deer either migrate west to summer ranges on Road Canyon and Gravel Ridges or east to the Owyhee Mountains along the Idaho border. Five mule deer winter separately near U.S. Route 95, in areas containing higher percentages of western juniper. In the spring, they travel southeast into Nevada to summer on the Santa Rosa Range, with one mule deer migrating to the Tuscarora Mountains. Of the Southeast mule deer that were tracked for at least 100 days, 82 percent migrate seasonally, with several moving to summer ranges in different states, complicating issues of population management. The Southeast mule deer herd faces several challenges, including highways and the low abundance of preferred browse. This layer's data were collected as part of a project conducted between 2018 and 2022. The project is ongoing. This dataset was derived from three separate datasets for the Southeast 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. All three datasets contained the fields “State,” “Species,” “Herd,” “DataType,” and “Contour.” For consistency and clarity with other mule deer datasets, the “State” field was removed from all three datasets. Additionally, the “Contour” field was renamed to “Use.” Rather than retaining numeric values (e.g., 10 and 50), stopover features were assigned the value “stopover,” and winter range features were assigned the value “winter range.” This change was made because the “Use” field is utilized across mule deer 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. Attributes (not all field definitions may be listed): ───┬────────────┬────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Use│ │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 10–15% of the sampled population. ───┼────────────┼────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── │High │This value represents the "high use" corridor or the combined animal utilization distributions for 15–20% of the sampled population. ───┼────────────┼────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── │Very High │This value represents the "very high use" corridor or the combined animal utilization distributions for >20% of sampled population. ───┴────────────┴──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────