California Mule Deer Bucks Mountain-Mooretown Corridors

The Bucks Mountain-Mooretown mule deer herd winters in the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada. The winter range includes vernal pool grassland, oak woodland, and dense conifer that is shared with a resident portion of the herd on a mix of public and private lands. In the spring, the Bucks Mountain-Mooretown herd migrates along the U.S. Highway 70 corridor and high-elevation locations of the Sierra Nevada east and south to higher elevation terrain in the Plumas National Forest east of the Sierra Nevada near Quincy and La Porte, California. The summer range is primarily mixed conifer opening up to high alpine granite near the crest, and transitioning to a mix of conifer and shrub on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada. Although the population size is not well known, it is considered stable to declining, affected primarily by dense overstory, environmental stressors, and habitat loss. This GPS collaring project was designed as part of a region-wide effort to obtain abundance estimates for deer using fecal DNA and home range analyses, with pinpointing migration routes and identifying winter ranges a secondary priority. Due to the low sample size, additional migration routes and winter ranges probably exist beyond the extent of our model output. These mapping layers show the location of the migration corridors for mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) in the Bucks Mountain-Mooretown population in California. They were developed from 11 migration sequences collected from a sample size of 4 animals comprising GPS locations collected every 1-12 hours.