What is it about?
Adult female roe deer living in an extensive (200 sq km) forest landscape were heavier when their home range offered access to arable. However, counter-intuitively, we found that females with access to arable were less fecund (after controlling for the body mass effect). We speculate that this may be due to inter-specific competition with other introduced deer species that congregate near the arable boundary.
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Why is it important?
Understanding how landscape quality and context affects deer fecundity is important in order to take an evidence-based approach to landscape scale deer management - needed to mitigate impacts on other biodiversity, as well as human health, forest crop impacts, and road traffic risk.
Perspectives
This work results from a long-term collaborative study between the University of East Anglia and Forestry Commission England, and was made possible by data collected by the FC wildlife ranger team. The study was led by Valentina Zini and Kristin Waber.
Professor Paul M Dolman
University of East Anglia
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Habitat quality, configuration and context effects on roe deer fecundity across a forested landscape mosaic, PLoS ONE, December 2019, PLOS,
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0226666.
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