California Elk Marble Mountain Annual Range

Little information exists regarding demographic rates and abundance of elk in the Marble Mountains in California. In the early 1990s and 2000s, elk were reintroduced from Oregon into the Marble Mountain area (CDFW, 2018). Since then, elk have reestablished throughout much of the area, but GPS collar data and information on movement are limited. Current research examines how fire influences elk occupancy in the area. Elk were collared from 2006 to 2013, at sites in the Klamath National Forest and Marble Mountain Wilderness in the north, and close to Cecilville in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest in the south. After collaring, elk were separated into three distinct sub-herds (north: Ukonom, central: Wooley Creek, and south: South Fork) due to non-overlapping GPS data points within these areas. The Marble Mountain elk do not migrate between traditional summer and winter seasonal ranges. Instead, the herd contains short-distance elevation-based migrants that display a nomadic migratory tendency, moving up or down elevational gradients. Some elk used higher elevation areas throughout the summer, though this pattern was not ubiquitous. Therefore, annual home ranges were modeled using year-round GPS data to demarcate high use areas in lieu of modeling the specific winter ranges commonly seen in other ungulate analyses in California. More collars are being deployed in collaboration with the Karuk Tribe, but these data are not included here. These mapping layers show the location of the annual ranges for elk (Cervus canadensis) in the Marble Mountain population in California. They were developed from 12 sequences collected from a sample size of 11 animals comprising GPS locations collected every 2-10 hours.

[
  "010:12"
]

[
  "geospatial"
]