Hunting intensity alters movement behaviour of white-tailed deer

Impacts of human hunting on spatial behavior of white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus)

“…The study consisted of a spatial arrangement of hunted treatments (n = 2) and a control treatment (see fig. 1 in Little et al 2016). .…”

“…Previous analysis demonstrated that deer responded behaviorally (i.e., altered movement behavior) to the presence of hunters where hourly distance travelled by adult males declined across the study period in both density treatments, as well as the safe control treatment (Little et al 2016). Although there were two density treatments across five discrete temporal risk-exposure periods, we were interested in temporal trends in the data (i.e., modeling the relationship between movement and range use over time) and longer term spatial and temporal processes.…”

“…Treatment areas were re-randomized during year 2. The two hunted treatments were further divided into hunting compartments to distribute hunters across the landscape at the appropriate density of hunters (Little et al 2014(Little et al , 2016. Although the targeted density of hunters was not met each day of the 16-day hunting season, we did, however, maintain the respective ratio of hunters between high-and low-density treatments.…”

“…A 2-day interval was chosen because this was short enough to highlight gradual shifts in deer behavior when using a moving window across overlapping days, but long enough in that it resulted in ϳ360 GPS locations per interval, which was deemed a suitable number for computing home ranges (sensu Girard et al 2006). Although the study area was divided into spatial units of varying hunter density, we chose to analyze only the temporal component of the data because of trends found in Little et al (2016), and the fact that 2-day movement and space-use metrics likely did not occur solely within one treatment area, meaning that deer likely used multiple treatments or areas off of the property. For each 2-day interval, the total movement path length (m) was computed as the sum of the straight-line distances between consecutive points ( Fig.…”

“…In total, 45 adult male deer were collared (2008: n = 25; 2009: n = 27), with 7 individuals having data covering both years. However, we restricted analysis to 30 unique individual deer consisting of 37 deer-year combinations (19 in 2008, 18 in 2009); 15 deer were excluded because of illegal or legal harvest prior to the study, mechanical failure of the collar, natural mortality, deer-vehicle collision, and dispersal from the study area (Little et al 2016). During the study period, GPS collars were programmed to attempt one relocation fix every 8 min.…”