Mule Deer Toiyabe Herd

The Area 17-Toiyabe mule deer herd inhabits the Shoshone Mountains and Toiyabe Range, which run north to south in central Nevada. Mule deer from the Shoshone Mountains and Toiyabe Range are characterized by short distance migrations from high elevations above 7,874 ft (2,400 m) down to 5,577 ft (1,700 m). Since the 1920s, the lower elevation slopes east of Toiyabe Dome, between Wisconsin Creek and Broad Creek and locally known a Toiyabe bench, have been documented by the Nevada Department of Wildlife as crucial mule deer winter range. Senescent browse, reduced forbs, drought, and pinyon and juniper encroachment are the greatest conservation challenges the Area 17-Toiyabe mule deer herd face. This layer's data were collected as part of a project conducted between 2018 and 2021. This dataset was derived from three separate datasets for the Toiyabe 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 10–20% of the sampled population. ───┼────────────┼────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── │High │This value represents the "high use" corridor or the combined animal utilization distributions for >20% of sampled population. ───┴────────────┴──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────