DOI: 10.5061/dryad.zkh1893mp
title: Data from: Hierarchy in structuring of resource selection: Understanding elk selection across space, time, and movement strategies

description: Movement is a fundamental aspect of animal ecology that varies across
 space, time, and among individuals or groups within a population. Broad
 scale patterns of animal movement are often classified into different
 movement strategies such as resident, nomadic, and migratory. While
 landscape-level environmental patterns can predict the presence of
 different movement strategies in an area, elucidating how these patterns
 downscale to fine-scale resource selection behaviors remains a challenge.
 Partially migratory systems, where both migrants and residents coexist,
 offer a unique opportunity to address these questions. Using tracking data
 from four Rocky Mountain elk (Cervus canadensis) herds situated primarily
 within Colorado, USA, we assessed between-herd, seasonal, and within-herd
 variation in resource selection behavior. We modelled fine-scale seasonal
 resource selection and compared strategy-specific behaviors using resource
 selection functions. Additionally, we used a consistency score to quantify
 the extent of differentiation in resource selection behavior across
 strategies, seasons, herds, and groups of covariates. We found variation
 in strategy frequency within each herd and in selection behavior,
 highlighting the complexity and context-dependence of strategy-specific
 selection. Despite herd-specific differences, some consistent trends
 emerged, with elk avoiding human development and roads at fine scales
 while selecting areas with higher productivity during summer. Our
 consistency analysis identified where elk most diverged in their selection
 behavior, revealing the greatest differences among herds, followed by
 variation between seasons, and lastly between movement strategies. Elk
 exhibited more uniform responses to productivity, contrasting with greater
 differentiation in responses to anthropogenic-related covariates. Overall,
 our study improves our understanding of elk behavior across space, time,
 and movement strategies, and sheds light on the hierarchical influences of
 space and time in constraining behavior.
description: # Data from: Hierarchy in structuring of resource selection: Understanding
 elk selection across space, time, and movement strategies
 [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.zkh1893mp](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.zkh1893mp) ## Description of the data and file structure Crews, S., N. D. Rayl, M. W. Alldredge, E. J. Bergman, C. R. Anderson Jr., E. H. VanNatta, J. D. Holbrook, and G. Bastille-Rousseau. Hierarchy in structuring of resource selection: understanding elk selection across space, time, and movement strategies. *Ecology and Evolution*. **Crews_etal_Elk_RSF_Hierarchy_Data.csv file** with 10677684 rows and 16 columns. Rows contain covariate information for 1306349 used and 9371335 available elk locations from 386 adult female elk monitored in 4 herds in and around Colorado, USA from March 4, 2017 - April 14, 2022. Note that these locations exclude periods categorized as ‘migration’, which were used in the classification of movement strategies, but not in generation of resource selection functions. Additionally, this data set excludes instances where the NDVI value was NA due to data insufficiency during processing of satellite imagery products. The file contains columns with the unique elk-year identifier (“id”), the herd of the elk-year (“herd”), the movement strategy classification of the elk-year (“movement_strategy”), the date/timestamp in local Mountain Time (“timestamp”), the seasonal time period e.g. Winter or Summer (“season”), the field season/year in which the elk was collared (“year_tagged”), the used/available classification (“used”; 1 = used, 0 = available), the distance to anthropogenic feature in meters (“dist_to_feature”) and the transformed distance to anthropogenic feature (i.e. added 1 and applied the natural logarithm to values and then scaled; “dist_to_feature_log_scaled”), the daily interpolated normalized difference vegetation index (“ndvi”) and the scaled daily interpolated normalized difference vegetation index (“ndvi_scaled”), the land cover type (“crops”, “forest”, “herbaceous”, “other”; value is 1 where the land cover is of a given type and 0 outside of this), and the unique combination id-season-year identifier (“id_season_year”).