Scales of movement and contact structure among white-tailed deer in central New York

I studied the movement behavior of white-tailed deer to inform the distribution of risk for disease spread from a point of first observation. Using high resolution GPS collar data, I studied how deer perceive and respond to the landscape by altering movements, and how their collective movements structure contact events in time and across space.;I investigated the potential impact of GPS positional error on first-passage time analysis (FPT). I evaluated the habitat specific positional error of stationary GPS collars placed under a range of canopy covers. I analyzed iterations of each movement path with error added according to habitat-specific error distributions. For deer in the fragmented forest-agriculture environment, and species that move across similar geographic extents, I suggest that FPT is robust with regard to positional errors.;I characterized seasonal scales of movement of white-tailed deer in an agricultural-forest matrix using FPT and investigated whether those scales were driven by demographic or landscape features. I found that FPT for each individual across all seasons was typically dominated by peaks at small, intermediate, and large geographic scales. Models relating landscape features to those scales indicate that deer perceive and move within the landscape differently as the roles of dominant land-cover types shift seasonally.;Contact rates are an essential component of disease transmission but few specific data are available to parameterize models. My objectives were to quantify those rates empirically across time and space using separation distance between GPS collared deer. I observed increased daily probabilities of direct contact in winter, dropping to low levels post-parturition through summer, and increasing during the rut to winter levels. The cumulative distribution of direct and indirect contact probabilities increased rapidly with distance, indicating that most contact events occur between individuals within landscape extents much smaller than those typically delineated in response to disease management. Although contact rates differed seasonally, they occurred proportionally across similar landscape extents throughout the year.;Key Words: contact rates, first-passage time, GPS error, landscape heterogeneity, movement, Odocoileus virginianus, white-tailed deer...