DOI: 10.5061/dryad.2hb22
title: Data from: Linking landscape-scale differences in forage to ungulate nutritional ecology

description: Understanding how habitat and nutritional condition affect ungulate
 populations is necessary for informing management, particularly in areas
 experiencing carnivore recovery and declining ungulate population trends.
 Variations in forage species availability, plant phenological stage, and
 the abundance of forage make it challenging to understand landscape-level
 effects of nutrition on ungulates. We developed an integrated spatial
 modeling approach to estimate landscape-level elk (Cervus elaphus)
 nutritional resources in two adjacent study areas that differed in coarse
 measures of habitat quality and related the consequences of differences in
 nutritional resources to elk body condition and pregnancy rates. We found
 no support for differences in dry matter digestibility between plant
 samples or in phenological stage based on ground sampling plots in the two
 study areas. Our index of nutritional resources, measured as digestible
 forage biomass, varied among landcover types and between study areas. We
 found that altered plant composition following fires was the biggest
 driver of differences in nutritional resources, suggesting that
 maintaining a mosaic of fire history and distribution will likely benefit
 ungulate populations. Study area, lactation status and year affected fall
 body fat of adult female elk. Elk in the study area exposed to lower
 summer range nutritional resources had lower nutritional condition
 entering winter. These differences in nutritional condition resulted in
 differences in pregnancy rate, with average pregnancy rates of 89% for elk
 exposed to higher nutritional resources and 72% for elk exposed to lower
 nutritional resources. Summer range nutritional resources have the
 potential to limit elk pregnancy rate and calf production, and these
 nutritional limitations may predispose elk to be more sensitive to the
 effects of harvest or predation. Wildlife managers should identify
 ungulate populations that are nutritionally limited and recognize that
 these populations may be more impacted by recovering carnivores or harvest
 than populations inhabiting more productive summer habitats.
description: elk_dataThis file contains the fall elk body fat (IFBF) and pregnancy data used in analyses. For fall measurements, lactation status is included; in late-winter/spring measurements lactation status could not be determined. Age was estimated from tooth eruption and wear patterns. Pregnancy was estimated from PSPB levels in the blood. IFBF was estimated following the revised methods of Cook et al. (2010) that included an allometrically scaled MAXFAT index.Elk diet dataThis file contains the elk diet data collected in the East Fork and West Fork areas. Fecal plant fragment analyses were conducted at the Wildlife Habitat Nutrition Laboratory (Pullman, WA, USA) at level B (&gt;5% prevalence in diet) species composition to estimate East Fork and West Fork seasonal diets. Each row represents a composite pellet samplediet_bypopulation_by season.csvGDM_dataset_summerThis file contains the forb, graminoid, and shrub grams of digestible energy (GDM) and all covariates for each sampling plot used in the summer analysis of nutritional resources.GDM_dataset_winterThis file contains the forb, graminoid, and shrub grams of digestible energy (GDM) and all covariates for each sampling plot used in the winter analysis of nutritional resources.