Mule Deer Carson River Herd

A significant portion of the interstate Carson River herd summers in the Sierra Nevada range of California and migrates to a winter range near the California-Nevada border. Herd size has declined significantly (>70%) from historical peak levels, likely due to habitat loss and vehicle collisions. A large increase in housing development and traffic along the Highway 395 corridor during the past 20 years has contributed to population declines for this herd. Significant barriers include fencing along Carson River and outlying suburban areas in Carson City, Minden, and Gardnerville, Nevada. This layer's data were collected as part of a project conducted between 2012 and 2019. This dataset was derived from three separate datasets for the Carson River 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 both include a field named “GRIDCODE,” while the stopover dataset contained a single attribute field named “layer” with a value of 1. The corridor dataset also included two additional fields not present in the other two datasets named “ID” and “Use.” For consistency, the “GRIDCODE” field and its associated values were preserved for the corridor and winter range datasets and assigned null values for stopover features. The “Use” field was also retained and assigned values of “stopover” and “winter range” for the stopover and winter range features, respectively. The “layer” field from the stopover dataset was removed, and the “ID” field from the corridor dataset was also removed. For consistency and clarity with other mule deer datasets, three additional fields were added: “Species,” “Herd,” and “DataType.” The “DataType” field represents the type of feature, with values of corridor, stopover, and winter range. 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. ────────┼───┼──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── │0.5│Population level contours of winter ranges. 50% of wintering population. ────────┼───┼──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── │1 │This value represents the "low use" corridor or the 99% level population footprint of the combined animal utilization distributions. ────────┼───┼──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── │10 │This value represents the "medium use" corridor (>10% of sample population) ────────┼───┼──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── │20 │This value represents the "high use" corridor (>20% of sample population) ────────┴───┴────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────