Well, it's been a busy year and I'm pleased to share that our research into drivers of white-tailed deer dispersal in Wisconsin has just been published! Our new manuscript, "Agricultural land use shapes dispersal in white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus)" is now freely available through the journal Movement Ecology. For this research, we developed a semi-automated method to detect dispersal events from the movement data for almost 600 individual deer. We found that the vast majority of dispersal events were performed by young males, and they typically dispersed short distances (median distance of 5.77km or about 3.6 mi). We also examined how factors like land use (forest versus agricultural land) and the traversability of landscape affected the probability that young males would disperse, how far they dispersed, and the paths that they took during dispersal. We found that, in the spring, young male deer were more likely to disperse with increasing amounts of agricultural land in their natal (pre-dispersal) home range. Regardless of the time of year, we also found that young male deer tended to disperse longer distances with increasing amounts of agricultural land in their potential dispersal paths. Lastly, we found that these males tended to avoid agricultural land during their dispersal events. These results lead us to believe that agricultural land use plays a major role in shaping dispersal ecology in southwest Wisconsin—and this could impact processes like gene flow and geographic disease spread. For example, if the deadly prion disease chronic wasting disease (CWD) were introduced in a heavily agricultural area, we might expect CWD to spread geographically via dispersal more rapidly than if the disease were introduced in a heavily forested area. We are excited to share these new results and look forward to share more of our ongoing work on deer movement ecology and CWD transmission soon! Comments are closed.
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