Predation has a greater impact in less productive environments: variation in roe deer, Capreolus capreolus , population density across Europe (original) (raw)
Animals
European roe deer (Capreolus capreolus L.) are important given their economic, recreational and ecological value. However, uncontrolled roe deer numbers can result in negative impacts on forest regeneration and agricultural crops, disease transmission and occurrences of deer-vehicle collisions. Information on the abundance and distribution is needed for effective management. We combined distance sampling (DS) of roe deer dung pellet groups with multiple variables to develop a density surface model (DSM) in the federal state of Bavaria in south-eastern Germany. We used the estimates of pellet group density as a proxy for roe deer relative abundance. We extrapolated our best DSM, conducted a quantitative evaluation and contrasted relative abundance along climate and land-use gradients. Relative abundance of roe deer was influenced by a combination of habitat type, climate and wildlife management variables, which differed between seasons and which reflected changes in food and shelter ...
Journal of Animal Ecology, 2013
""1. Because many large mammal species have wide geographic ranges, spatially distant populations may be confronted with different sets of limiting factors. Investigating how home range (HR) size varies across environmental gradients should yield a better understanding of the factors affecting large mammal ecology. 2. We evaluated how HR size of a large herbivore, the roe deer (Capreolus capreolus), varies in relation to seasonality, latitude (climate), weather, plant productivity and landscape features across its geographic range in Western Europe. As roe deer are income breeders, expected to adjust range size continuously to temporal variation in food resources and energetic requirements, our baseline prediction was for HR size to decrease with proxies of available energy. 3. We used GPS locations of roe deer collected from 7 study sites (EURODEER collaborative project) to estimate fixed kernel HR size at weekly and monthly temporal scales. We performed an unusually comprehensive analysis of variation in HR size among populations and among individuals across the geographic range of a single species using generalized additive mixed models and linear mixed models respectively. 4. Among populations, HR size decreased with increasing values for proxies of forage abundance, but increased with increases in seasonality, stochastic variation of temperature, latitude and snow cover. Within populations, roe deer HR size varied over time in relation to seasonality and proxies of forage abundance in a consistent way across the 7 populations. Thus, our findings were broadly consistent across the distributional range of this species, demonstrating a strong and ubiquitous link between the amplitude and timing of seasonality and HR size at the continental scale. 5. Overall, the variability in average HR size of roe deer across Europe reflects the interaction among local weather, climate and seasonality, providing valuable insight into the limiting factors affecting this large herbivore under contrasting conditions. The complexity of the relationships suggests that predicting ranging behaviour of large herbivores in relation to current and future climate change will require detailed knowledge not only about predicted increases in temperature, but also how this interacts with factors such as day length and climate predictability.""