| In western North America, much of the recent hydrocarbon development has overlapped with the range of mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus). Mule deer is a recreationally and economically important species, with over 80,000 animals harvested each year in the state of Colorado alone. However, deer populations across Western North America have declined over the last 20 years from historical highs, and recent research has highlighted hydrocarbon development as a potential driver of large scale displacement of deer from preferred areas on their winter range. My dissertation focuses on the behavioral response of adult female mule deer to ongoing natural gas development in the Piceance Basin of Northwestern Colorado. The Piceance Basin is a top energy reserve in the United States, containing natural gas and oil shale. In addition, this area holds one of the largest migratory mule deer herds in North America. As discussed above, the response of wildlife to development is complicated by the dynamic and variable nature of development, along with climatic conditions and deer condition, age, and reproductive status. I focus on behavioral responses of individual deer in an attempt to address some of this complexity. Throughout my dissertation (aside from Chapter 1, which is a review) I utilize global positioning system (GPS) radio collar data and contemporary statistical techniques developed in the field of animal movement ecology to assess the complex behavior of mule deer. Over the last decade, the field of animal movement ecology has progressed rapidly, with a major focus on the development of methods that account for the complex spatial and temporal structure in movement data. This progression has provided a plethora of new tools for ecologists to use in understanding animal behavior. However, these methods are difficult to implement for practitioners and thus the development of new methods has far outpaced their use in applied conservation and management contexts. I use these methods to gain insight into mule deer behavior, and to assess the impacts of natural gas development on these behaviors.;This dissertation is organized as follows. In chapter one, I review the global knowledge on the impacts of five energy sectors on terrestrial wildlife to set my work in the context of the current state of knowledge. In chapter two, I assess the effects of helicopter capture on mule deer behavior. The purpose of this chapter was to understand how our capture methods influenced subsequent inference related to mule deer behavior. In chapter three, I assessed an assumption of one of the primary methodologies used to examine the habitat selection process in animals, and one which I make use of in a later chapter, resource selection functions (RSFs). In chapter four, I apply what was learned in chapter three to mule deer data, fitting RSFs to winter range data from 2008 - 2010. In chapter five, I assess landscape factors influencing seasonal range size and philopatry of mule deer to understand the influence of development on mule deer space use. In chapter six, I examine the factors influencing foraging behavior of mule deer to understand how development impacts this behavior. Finally, in chapter seven, I assess the relationship between mule deer genetics, migratory behavior, and condition. (Abstract shortened by UMI.). |
