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Brandon M. Scurlock

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521 unique elk were monitored across several years with GPS collars in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem to determine winter-to-winter annual dispersal distances. There were a total of 704 annual movements. The dataset spans from 2001 to 2015. Annual movements were based on a single location in January or February and another location in the subsequent winter. An individual elk was included at most three times (once for each year) in the data. All elk were female, except one of the individuals in the dataset was a male. We included his movement in the analysis for completeness, but as there was only one male we chose not to directly model any differences in movement behavior between male and female elk.
The green wave hypothesis (GWH) states that migrating animals should track or ‘surf’ high-quality forage at the leading edge of spring green-up. To index such high-quality forage, recent work proposed the instantaneous rate of green-up (IRG), i.e. rate of change in the normalized difference vegetation index over time. Despite this important advancement, no study has tested the assumption that herbivores select habitat patches at peak IRG. We evaluated this assumption using step selection functions parametrized with movement data during the green-up period from two populations each of bighorn sheep, mule deer, elk, moose and bison, totalling 463 individuals monitored 1–3 years from 2004 to 2014. Accounting for variables...
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