Steamboat Mule Deer Migration, 2011-2013

To address management concerns in the northwest part of the Red Desert of Wyoming, the BLM initiated the Jack Morrow Hills Coordinated Activity Plan (JMHCAP). A central component of JMHCAP was a project designed to better understand mule deer migration patterns. To this end, the project successfully collared 60 individuals, 34 of which turned out to be suitable for analysis. The project then used the Brownian bridge movement model (BBMM; Horne et al. 2007) and the “BBMM” package in R (Nielson et al. 2011) to estimate population-level migration routes from the GPS collar data. Migration patterns were further analyzed following the Sawyer et al. (2009a) model by 1) estimating the routes of individuals, 2) combining individual routes to estimate a population level route, 3) delineating stopover sites, and 4) categorize travelled geography as high, medium, or low-use. This data has been updated through a sustained monitoring program that maintains a sample (n = ~30) of GPS collared deer.