PARENT SESSION
Symposium 19: Spatial nonlinearities and cross scale interactions: Cascading effects in the Earth System
Organized by: DC Peters and BT Bestelmeyer
Thursday, August 11, 1:30 PM - 5:00 PM, Meeting Room 517 A, Level 5, Palais des congrès de Montréal

Prions, people, and wildlife: Identifying critical scales of interaction in mule deer populations.

Hobbs, N. Thompson^*,1, Farnsworth, Mathew¹, Hoeting, Jennifer², Miller, Michael³, ¹ Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory, Fort Collins, Co, USA² Department of Statistics, Fort Collins, Co³ Colorado Division of Wildlife, Fort Collins, Co, USA

ABSTRACT- Observed spatial patterns in natural systems may result from processes acting across multiple spatial and temporal scales. Spatially explicit data on the nested processes that generate ecological patterns, such as the distribution of disease over a landscape, are frequently unavailable across scales. Our goal was to identify scales of mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) movement that exerted the greatest influence on the spatial pattern of chronic wasting disease (CWD) in northcentral Colorado. We hypothesize that three scales of mixing, individual home range, winter sub-population, or summer sub-population, might control spatial variation in disease prevalence. We used a fully Bayesian hierarchical analysis to compare the strength of evidence for models portraying mixing at each hypothesized scale. We found strong evidence that finel-scale movement patterns are related to the spatial distribution of CWD infection. There was also evidence that land ownership and habitat use influence the spatial structure of the disease, along with the known offsets of sex and age. Our analysis demonstrates how information on the scales of spatial processes that generate observed patterns can be used to gain insight when process data are sparse or unavailable.

Key words: disease, land-use, Bayesian