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Winter ranges of mule deer in the Pequop Mountains, Nevada

The Area 7 mule deer population is one of the state’s largest deer herds with an estimated population of about 11,000 in 2019. This deer herd is highly important to Nevada from an economic and ecological perspective. It’s one of the longest distance deer migrations in the state of Nevada with some animals known to migrate over 120 miles during a single migration. A subset of this population, known as the “Pequop” herd, crosses a major highway (US highway 93) and an interstate (Interstate-80) twice annually during their seasonal migration. Several million dollars in wildlife crossing structures have been constructed to help these deer during their migration, yet they still face challenges to connectivity between winter and summer ranges including miles of livestock fencing and a large-scale gold mine operation in close proximity a large stop-over site near Long Canyon. Winter range for this deer herd occurs primarily along the east side of the Pequop Mountains from Sixmile Creek to Ninemile Canyon. The largest stopovers occur along the west side of Snake Mountains near Tabor Creek, Antelope Peak and Bishop Creek areas, north and south of Interstate 80 near Pequop Summit, and the Sixmile Creek to Long Canyon area in the Pequop Mountains. Summer range for this herd primarily occurs between the Owyhee and Bruneau Rivers east of Wildhorse Reservoir. These data provide the location of winter ranges for mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) in the Pequop Mountains, Nevada. They were developed from Brownian bridge movement models (Sawyer et al. 2009) using 193 winter sequences collected from a sample size of 86 animals comprising GPS locations collected every 1-25 hours.

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Author(s) Matthew J Kauffman orcid, Holly Copeland, Eric Cole, Matt Cuzzocreo, Sarah Dewey, Julien Fattebert, Jeff Gagnon, Emily Gelzer, Tabitha A Graves orcid, Kent Hersey, Rusty Kaiser, James Meacham, Jerod A. Merkle, Arthur Middleton, Tristan Nunez, Brendan Oates, Daniel Olson, Lucas Olson, Hall Sawyer, Cody Schroeder, Scott Sprague, Alethea Steingisser, Mark Thonhoff
Publication Date 2020-11-09
Beginning Date of Data 2011-01-01
Ending Date of Data 2017-12-01
Data Contact
Cody Schroeder
DOI https://doi.org/10.5066/P9O2YM6I
Citation Kauffman, M.J., Copeland, H., Cole, E., Cuzzocreo, M., Dewey, S., Fattebert, J., Gagnon, J., Gelzer, E., Graves, T.A., Hersey, K., Kaiser, R., Meacham, J., Merkle, J.A., Middleton, A., Nunez, T., Oates, B., Olson, D., Olson, L., Sawyer, H., Schroeder, C., Sprague, S., Steingisser, A., and Thonhoff, M., 2020, Winter ranges of mule deer in the Pequop Mountains, Nevada: U.S. Geological Survey data release, https://doi.org/10.5066/P9O2YM6I.
Metadata Contact
Matthew Kauffman
Metadata Date 2022-08-28
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License http://www.usa.gov/publicdomain/label/1.0/
Harvest Source: ScienceBase
Harvest Date: 2025-02-18T05:16:44.483Z