Mule Deer Warner Herd

The Warner mule deer herd uses varying life history strategies corresponding with multiple migratory and nonmigratory tactics. Mule deer wintering near Warner Valley and Oregon Route 140 migrate west in spring to Bald Hills and higher elevations in the Warner Mountains, and nonmigratory deer reside along U.S. Highway 395. One GPS-collared mule deer migrated south from a winter range in Oregon to a summer range northwest of Mosquito Valley in northern Nevada. The Warner mule deer herd faces several threats, including annual grass invasion and western juniper encroachment, as well as changing climate regimes that reduce forage quality and water availability. Predation, diseases such as epizootic hemorrhagic disease, and highways also contribute to mortality. This layer's data were collected as part of a project conducted between 2018 and 2023. The project is ongoing. This dataset was derived from three separate datasets for the Warner 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. ───┴────────────┴──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────