Mule Deer Spring Mountains Herd

The Spring Mountains are critical habitat for the Spring Mountains mule deer herd in southern Nevada. The migratory behavior of the Spring Mountains mule deer herd is variable, with a mix of year-round residents and short-distance elevational migrants. Lovell Canyon serves as a well-used corridor between high-elevation summer range near Mount Charleston and low-elevation winter range near Mountain Springs. In 2020, a wildlife underpass was completed to facilitate movement across State Route 160 and reduce wildlife-vehicle collisions. Encroaching development, prolonged drought conditions, wildfires, feral equids, and human recreation affect the persistence of the mule deer herd in the Spring Mountains. This layer's data were collected as part of a project conducted between 2015 and 2021. This dataset was derived from three separate datasets for the Spring Mountains 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. ───┴────────────┴──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────