White‐tailed deer habitat use and implications for chronic wasting disease transmission
Animal space use, activity patterns, and habitat selection—and heterogeneity in these patterns—have important implications for where and when infectious diseases are transmitted. White-tailed deer ( Odocoileus virginianus ) are habitat generalists, with a high degree of heterogeneity in their movement ecology based on sex, age, season, and region. These heterogeneities have important implications for the transmission and management of chronic wasting disease (CWD), which is a deadly prion disease transmitted both directly and indirectly through the environment. As such, favored deer habitats may promote direct interactions between conspecifics or indirect spatial overlap and subsequent environmental transmission. However, little is known about how individual animal space use translates to actual spatial overlap between individuals, leaving uncertainty in how habitat shapes the risk of direct or environmental CWD transmission. In this study, we evaluated seasonal activity patterns, home ranges, and habitat selection for 596 white-tailed deer in southwest Wisconsin, USA, from 2017-2022. We also estimated seasonal encounter distributions—regions where a pair of deer were most likely to encounter each other—for all pairs of deer putatively in different social groups (between-group) in our study, and quantified seasonal variation in the habitat composition of these areas. We found that deer selection for crops, pasture, or grasslands was generally low, relative to forest, but was highest in the post-fawning (summer) and non-breeding (winter) seasons. We observed similar patterns for the habitat composition of encounter distributions, suggesting that crops, pasture, and grasslands may be attractive resources that facilitate between-group transmission. Site fidelity between years was generally high; combined with small female home ranges in the fawning season, this implies that females likely re-use the same small, high-quality fawning habitats from year to year. We found that attraction toward between-group individuals was low during the post-fawning season but high during the breeding (fall) and non-breeding seasons. These results suggest that space use and habitat selection could shape the risk of environmental transmission in the fawning and post-fawning seasons, social selection could favor direct transmission risk in the breeding season, and combined social and habitat selection may shape risk of both direct and environmental transmission during the non-breeding season. We provide a detailed picture of the physiological and social drivers of deer movement through the year, with implications for CWD transmission and management.