DOI: 10.5061/dryad.zw3r22895
title: Summer elk habitat selection in southwest Montana

description: Data used in Ranglack et al. (in review), Modeling broad-scale patterns of
 elk summer resource selection in Montana using regional and
 population-specific models. Understanding animal distribution is important
 for the management of populations and their habitats. Across the western
 United States, elk (Cervus canadensis) provide important ecological,
 cultural, and economic benefits and the sound management of their habitats
 is of vital importance. In western Montana, National Forest lands are
 managed in part to provide and protect elk habitat needs, and summer elk
 habitat is managed with consideration to motorized routes. We evaluated
 the relative importance of nutritional resources, access routes, and other
 landscape attributes on elk summer resource selection at multiple spatial
 scales, and compared resource selection among 9 different southwestern
 Montana elk populations to determine the applicability of generalized
 regional models for informing habitat management recommendations. First,
 we developed 9 population-specific and 2 regional summer resource
 selection models. Second, we evaluated the performance of each model
 within and among elk populations using cross-validation scores to identify
 the best model. We found that in all populations nutritional resources,
 best represented using NDVI metrics, were the most important factors
 associated with elk summer resource selection. Access routes affected
 resource selection in all populations, however, the influence of access
 routes was relatively modest as compared to nutritional resources. Of the
 access route covariates we considered, the density of all routes (i.e.,
 routes open and closed to motorized use) explained the most variation in
 summer elk resource selection. Validation of population-specific resource
 selection models among populations revealed that in many cases model
 predictions extrapolated to areas outside of the development area had
 modest to poor predictive performance, especially as the distance from the
 modeled population increased. Thus, caution should be used when
 extrapolating resource selection models based on a single study population
 to other populations. Regional models of resource selection predicted
 resource selection across populations better than population-specific
 models, particularly when constructed by pooling data from multiple
 populations, and we recommend these types of models be used to inform
 regional habitat management policies. Our results suggest that managers
 should expand the current management paradigm for elk summer habitat that
 is focused on limiting access route density to also consider nutritional
 resources as an important component of elk summer habitat.
description: This data was collected by Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks in 9
 different elk herds in Montana for a variety of different research
 projects. This specific dataset includes both used and available locations
 and a variety of associated habitat attributes used for resource selection
 function analysis.  There are two different files: one
 file includes a subset of all the collected data (4 locations per day per
 individual, selected randomly) that was used for the results presented in
 the main text of the paper, and one file that includes all of the
 (cleaned) data that was used for the GLMMs presented in the
 appendix.