Fall elk (Cervus canadensis) habitat management on public lands provides security areas for reasonable elk survival and hunter opportunity. The management focus of maintaining or improving security areas, combined with conservative harvest regulations, may explain why some elk populations have increased in the western United States. However, in areas that include lands that restrict public hunter access, elk may alter their space use patterns during the hunting season by increasing use of areas that restrict public hunter access rather than using security areas on adjacent public lands. We used global positioning system location data from 325 adult female elk in 9 southwest Montana populations to determine resource selection during the archery and rifle hunting seasons. We found that during the archery season, in order of decreasing strength of selection, elk selected for areas that restricted access to public hunters, had greater time-integrated normalized difference vegetation index values, had higher canopy cover, were farther from motorized routes, and had lower hunter effort. During the rifle season, in order of decreasing strength of selection, elk selected for areas that restricted access to public hunters, were farther from motorized routes, had higher canopy cover, and had higher hunter effort. Interactions among several covariates revealed dependencies in elk resource selection patterns. Further, cross-population analyses revealed increased elk avoidance of motorized routes with increasing hunter effort during both the archery and rifle hunting seasons. We recommend managing for areas with !13% canopy cover that are !2,760 m from motorized routes, and identifying and managing for areas of high nutritional resources within these areas to create security areas on public lands during archery season. During the rifle season, we recommend managing for areas with !9% canopy cover that are !1,535 m from motorized routes, and are !20.23 km 2 . Lastly, given increased elk avoidance of motorized routes with higher hunter effort, we recommend that to maintain elk on public lands, managers consider increasing the amount of security in areas that receive high hunter effort, or hunting seasons that limit hunter effort in areas of high motorized route densities. Ó

Understanding animal distribution is important for 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 nine different southwestern Montana elk populations to determine the applicability of generalized regional models for informing habitat management recommendations. First, we developed nine population‐specific and two regional summer resource selection models. Second, we evaluated the predictive 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 normalized difference vegetation index (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 with nutritional resources. Of the access route covariates we considered, density of all routes (i.e., routes open and closed to motorized use) explained 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 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 any 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.

The Montana Fish, Wildhfe & Parks (FWP), U.S. Forest Service (FS), and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) are proposing a mountain-range wide strategy for increasing the distribution and abundance of westslope cutthroat trout (WCT) populations in the Elkhom Mountains, hnplementation of the program would include construction and installation of fish baniers; removal of non-native fishes by electrofishing and through the application of a fish toxicant. The program would also include im'entory, data collection, and monitoring. The decision that will be made from the analysis (which is documented in an Environmental Assessment or EA) is programmatic in nature, and it will define the scope and intensity of work and establish a priority listing and time table for implementation of projects. Individual projects on specific streams will be analyzed at a more site-specific level and will follow standard Montana Environmental Policy Act (MEPA) and/or National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) procedures. The management goal for Montana's Statewide Plan for WCT restoration is to ensure the long-tenn selfsustaining persistence of the subspecies within each of the five major river drainages they historically inhabited in Montana (Clark Fork, Kootenai, Flathead, upper Missouri, and Saskatchewan). The statewide plan also seeks to maintain the genetic diversity and life histoiy strategies represented by the remaining WCT populations, and avoid listing of the species under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The Elkhom Mountain restoration program is consistent with statewide efforts to conser\'e westslope cutthi-oat trout. This program focuses on a geographic area (the Elkliora Mountains) with distinct genetic resources, rather than on individual watersheds. Two action alternatives (Alternatives 2 and 3) are presented in the EA, and both would result in reducing the relative risks of extinction of WCT in the Elkhom Mountains. However, the risk that WCT populafions would go exfinct in the Elkhom Mountains is largely dependant on the amount of project work accomplished during the 10-year program. The more comprehensive alternative (Alternative 3) would result in a more secure genetic resen'e of WCT in the Elkhom Mountains by the end of this 10 year program. Implementation of Altemative 2 would stabilize existing WCT populafions and replicate one exisfing genefic pool into a suitable stream, but would not result in establishing a connected populafion in the Elkhom Mountains. In addifion to securing existing populafions and introducing WCT to five additional streams, Altemative 3 proposes to establish connected WCT populations in the McClellan and upper Crow Creek watersheds. Successful establishment of WCT populafions in interconnected drainages is the best known tool for reducing risk of extinction and this strategy also helps meet statewide objectives for WCT in the upper Missouri basin. i The environmental review demonstrates that the impacts of the ahematives analyzed in this program are not significant. Although there are no project ...