Fall elk (Cervus canadensis) habitat management on public lands provides security areas for reasonable elk survival and hunter opportunity. The management focus of maintaining or improving security areas, combined with conservative harvest regulations, may explain why some elk populations have increased in the western United States. However, in areas that include lands that restrict public hunter access, elk may alter their space use patterns during the hunting season by increasing use of areas that restrict public hunter access rather than using security areas on adjacent public lands. We used global positioning system location data from 325 adult female elk in 9 southwest Montana populations to determine resource selection during the archery and rifle hunting seasons. We found that during the archery season, in order of decreasing strength of selection, elk selected for areas that restricted access to public hunters, had greater time‐integrated normalized difference vegetation index values, had higher canopy cover, were farther from motorized routes, and had lower hunter effort. During the rifle season, in order of decreasing strength of selection, elk selected for areas that restricted access to public hunters, were farther from motorized routes, had higher canopy cover, and had higher hunter effort. Interactions among several covariates revealed dependencies in elk resource selection patterns. Further, cross‐population analyses revealed increased elk avoidance of motorized routes with increasing hunter effort during both the archery and rifle hunting seasons. We recommend managing for areas with ≥13% canopy cover that are ≥2,760 m from motorized routes, and identifying and managing for areas of high nutritional resources within these areas to create security areas on public lands during archery season. During the rifle season, we recommend managing for areas with ≥9% canopy cover that are ≥1,535 m from motorized routes, and are ≥20.23 km². Lastly, given increased elk avoidance of motorized routes with higher hunter effort, we recommend that to maintain elk on public lands, managers consider increasing the amount of security in areas that receive high hunter effort, or hunting seasons that limit hunter effort in areas of high motorized route densities. © 2017 The Authors.Journal of Wildlife ManagementPublished by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Summary: Competition between livestock and wild ungulates is commonly perceived to occur on shared rangelands. In the Henry Mountains (HM) of Utah, a free‐ranging population of bisonBison bisonhas raised concerns among ranchers holding grazing permits on these public lands. Bison are the most conspicuous potential competitors with cattle, but lagomorphs (mainly jackrabbitsLepus californicus) are also abundant in this area. The local ranching community is applying political pressure on state and federal agencies to resolve ‘the bison problem’, but the relative grazing impacts of bison, cattle and lagomorphs have not previously been quantified. We constructed 40 grazing exclosures (each 5·95 m²) in the conflict area: 20 excluded bison + cattle (‘partial’) and 20 excluded bison + cattle + lagomorphs (‘full’). All exclosures, each with a paired open reference plot, were monitored for 1 year, and above‐ground plant production was measured.GPStelemetry (bison) and scheduled grazing (cattle) allowed visitation to be quantified for each ungulate species based on the number of ‘animal days’ in the area. Rancher perceptions of wildlife–cattle interactions were recorded in a questionnaire survey. Ranchers perceived bison as a high‐level competitor with cattle, whereas lagomorphs were perceived as low‐level competitors. Grazed reference plots yielded an average (±SE) of 22·7 g m⁻²(±5·16) of grass, compared to 36·5 g m⁻²(±7·33) in the partial exclosures and 43·7 g m⁻²(±7·61) in the full exclosures. Exclusion of large herbivores thus resulted in a 13·8 g m⁻²increase in grass biomass relative to the reference plots (P = 0·005), with the additional exclusion of lagomorphs resulting in a further 7·18 g m⁻²increase (P = 0·048). Overall, lagomorphs accounted for 34·1%, bison 13·7% and cattle 52·3% of the total grass biomass removed by all herbivores on the shared range. Synthesis and applications. Cattle face a greater competitive challenge from lagomorphs than from bison in the study area. This case study illustrates the need for science‐based management of social–ecological systems in which even long‐term resource users might underestimate the complexities of trophic interactions. Attention should be redirected at the lagomorphs and their main predators, coyotesCanis latrans, which are currently subject to population control. To reduce negative perceptions among local ranchers, options should be explored to incorporate benefit‐sharing into the management of the bison population.

Domestic livestock have replaced bison (Bison bison) on almost all the remaining rangelands of North America. One of the few places where bison and cattle (Bos taurus) comingle on shared rangelands is in the Henry Mountains (HM) of southern Utah. Ranchers there are concerned, however, that bison are selecting the same grazing areas that are needed by cattle. We used global positioning system telemetry on bison across the entire HM rangeland to determine which habitats are most important for bison throughout the seasonal cycle. Sexual segregation was also measured (using the segregation coefficient, SC) to determine if bison bulls exert localized impacts by congregating in certain habitats separate from cow/calf groups. The HM bison exhibited low levels of sexual segregation for both the breeding (SC = 0.048) and nonbreeding seasons (SC = 0.112). We found bison habitat use to be diverse and dynamic, with bison grazing effects distributed widely across habitats throughout the seasonal cycle. Patches of grassland, whether naturally occurring or created through burning or mechanical treatments, were favored regardless of their distance to water. Our findings should assist ranchers and agency personnel in moving forward with the integrated management of free-ranging bison and cattle on the HM rangeland, with implications for bison conservation on public lands elsewhere in the United States

Habitat manipulations through the use of fire or mechanical treatments are often used to combat woody plant encroachment and increase foraging opportunities for wildlife and livestock. This creates spatial heterogeneity in habitat quality that large herbivores should respond to in ways predicted by ideal free distribution theory. We monitored free-ranging bison to test whether, (1) manipulated habitats offer higher quality forage than habitats in undisturbed rangeland, (2) bison respond through changes in herd composition or activity to differences in habitat quality, and (3) burned and mechanically treated habitats offer similar forage qualities. We found that habitat types burned ∼10 years ago continue to produce higher quality forage as evidenced by bison fecal N concentration (14.4gkg−1 dry mass) than open (10.5gkg−1), closed (10.6gkg−1), or mechanically manipulated habitats (11.7gkg−1). Bison herd composition and activity did not vary across habitat types within seasons, despite some between-season variation in overall group composition with sexual segregation being most evident before mid-summer. For semi-arid rangelands encroached with woody vegetation (e.g. piñon–juniper in the western USA) our evidence from free-ranging bison indicates that burning results in higher quality forage than occurs in both mechanically manipulated and undisturbed habitats. Bison roam widely from water, sample available vegetation continuously, and are long-lived gregarious animals that learn to exploit the spatiotemporal heterogeneity in their large home ranges. Bison also have very similar diets to cattle and so, where bison and cattle are allowed to comingle, we suggest the foraging parameters of free-ranging bison are effective ecological indicators of rangeland quality for both bison and cattle

In semiarid ecosystems ungulate densities can compound the effects of drought on forage availability, which can feed back to regulate reproduction an

The North American model of wildlife conservation, based on the public trust doctrine, is credited for the recovery of several charismatic wildlife species, including the plains bison Bison bison. In that model, wildlife is a public resource from which the private sector may not profit either individually or collectively. In recent years, however, resilience thinking is driving changes in the traditional state-run wildlife management model to allow for integrated multi-sector approaches at the landscape scale. A free-ranging herd of bison on public land in the Henry Mountains of Utah is used as a case study to consider if and how a community-based conservation programme could be developed for a state-managed wildlife resource to benefit all stakeholders. The Henry Mountains bison, which are disease-free, share the rangeland with cattle that are privately owned by individual ranchers and corporations with various economic goals and environmental values. The ranchers currently derive no benefits from the bison and have concerns regarding competition between bison and cattle. However, a threshold harvesting strategy with community participation could generate revenue to offset these concerns. It could also provide benefits to the local community, increase state revenue, and increase the size of the bison population while securing its long-term genetic viability. Implementation would initially require facilitation by policy specialists, after which we suggest a Henry Mountains bison partnership could serve as a model for bison recovery efforts elsewhere in North America.