Migration Corridors of Mule Deer in the San Francisco Peaks Herd in Arizona

The San Francisco Peaks mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) herd makes one of Arizona’s most extraordinary annual migrations between Flagstaff, AZ and the Grand Canyon. The migration begins on summer range in GMU 7, where an estimated 5,300 mule deer reside. Their summer habitat contains alpine, subalpine, and ponderosa pine forests mixed with open grasslands and meadows. Beginning in October, a portion of the herd migrates north to GMU 9 to winter range along the South Rim containing pinyon-juniper, ponderosa pines, sagebrush, and cliffrose habitat. Through funding from Secretarial Order 3362, the Arizona Game and Fish Department (AZGFD) began a GPS collar study beginning in June of 2019. A total of 46 mule deer have been tracked through those efforts, greatly increasing our understanding of deer movements among this herd. The research study will be completed in 2023. In contrast to the Volume I report (Kauffman et al. 2020), the San Francisco Peaks mule deer herd in this Volume contains an additional 20 mule deer, 52 migrations, and 12 winter sequences. The primary challenges to mule deer in this migration corridor are related to navigating highways. These deer must traverse two major roads, U.S. Highway 180 and State Route 64, which experience high traffic volumes and are a source of mortality for this migrating mule deer herd. These data provide the location of migration corridors for Mule Deer from the San Francisco Peaks Herd in Arizona. They were developed from Brownian bridge movement models using 58 migration sequences collected from a sample size of 24 adult mule deer comprising GPS locations collected every 2-3 hours.

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