Mule Deer Casa Diablo Herd

Casa Diablo mule deer are largely traditional migrants, using a wide range primarily spread across public lands. The herd’s winter range stretches between the Benton Range and eastern Inyo National Forest. In spring, individuals move west using a wide range of routes; however, a concentrated migration corridor passes through Long Valley, across U.S. Highway 395, and into the high mountains of the Sierra Nevada Range. Summer range habitat straddles both sides of U.S. Highway 395. The primary causes of mortality include mountain lion predation, followed by vehicle collisions, which mostly occur on U.S. Highway 395 during fall and spring migrations. In 2019, the population size of the Casa Diablo herd was estimated at 2,460 (confidence interval: 2,037–3,107) individuals. This layer's data were collected as part of a project conducted between 2014 and 2023. This dataset was derived from three separate datasets for the Casa Diablo 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. ───┴────────────┴──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────