Study Area
We surveyed white-tailed deer distribution in the boreal forest of
northeast Alberta, Canada (Fig. 1). The 3500 km2landscape is a mosaic of aspen (Populus tremulodies ), white
spruce (Picea glauca ), black spruce (P. mariana ), and jack
pine (Pinus banksiana ) forests, interspersed with Ledum
groenlandicum -dominated muskeg. Widespread petroleum exploration and
extraction features, roads (car accessible), trails (off-road vehicle
accessible), forest harvesting, and other anthropogenic features are
dispersed throughout the study area (Fig. 1).
We deployed 62 camera-trap sites
(Reconyx PC900 HyperfireTM infra-red remote digital;
Holmen, WI, USA) in a constrained stratified random design
(Supplementary Information), sampled continuously between November 2011-
November 2014, as in Fisher and Burton
(2018); Fisher et al. (2020).
Following Burton et al. (2015), we
define ’site’ as the average area used by a deer (seasonally, in a
3-month window), centered on the camera detection zone. We define ’study
area’ as the ca. 3500 km2 minimum convex
polygon surrounding camera sites. Cameras were placed ca. 1m from
the ground facing the wildlife trail and set to high sensitivity with
3-s delay.