Editor’s alternative March/April 2023 | Wildlife Biology

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Submitted by editor on 23 February 2023. Get the paper!

The editor’s alternative is the article by Johnson et al.:

Assessing the Implications of Sexual Segregation when Surveying White-Tailed Deer (Odocoileus Virginianus)”

Ungulates and plenty of different recreation species are historically hunted through the mating season. As looking planning takes a while, inhabitants surveys are normally carried out a number of weeks to months earlier than the looking season to find out looking quotas.

For instance, in components of central Europe, purple deer (Cervus elaphus) are surveyed at winter feeding websites to find out looking quotas for the next summer time and autumn. Equally, white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) within the south-west of the USA are hunted in autumn primarily based on digital camera lure surveys in late summer time. Searching plans are thus primarily based on the belief that the spatial distribution of populations stays unchanged throughout seasons. Nonetheless, it’s apparent that surveys at occasions of sexual separation are hardly appropriate to foretell native abundance and spatial distribution through the mating season, when the sexes are prone to be blended. The result’s typically vigorous disputes between managers and hunters.

Of their paper, Johnson et al. assess results of shifts in house use on pre-season digital camera surveys of white-tailed deer. They convincingly present that the sexes had been extremely segregated through the pre-season surveys, however extremely overlapped through the breeding months, when males shifted their distribution in the direction of females. Thus, if administration models are smaller than a inhabitants’s actions, pre-season surveys could not sufficiently mirror numbers accessible for harvest through the looking season. The answer could also be in cooperative harvest planning and unbiased survey strategies, in addition to higher consciousness of the temporal and spatial dynamics of segregation versus attraction between the sexes.

/Ilse Storch

Editor-in-Chief
 

Classes: 

Basic

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