Habitat suitability assessment for tule elk in the San Francisco Bay and Monterey Bay areas

While California’s statewide tule elk (Cervus canadensis nannodes) population has recovered from two or three individual survivors in the late 19th century, the subspecies exists today in numerous widely disjunct populations, leaving vast areas of the species’ former range uninhabited. Large unoccupied areas of historic tule elk range include the Santa Cruz Mountains and the northern Diablo and northern Santa Lucia ranges. Natural range expansion by existing populations into these areas is blocked by major highways and urban development; although, before considering tule elk translocations, it is necessary to assess the habitat suitability there. To this end, we fit a resource selection function (RSF) using generalized linear mixed models to GPS collar data collected from nearby radio collared tule elk and used several environmental GIS layers to capture important habitat characteristics. We fit the RSF in a habitat use versus availability framework with only linear and quadratic terms and used stepwise model selection ranked by AICc to maximize its generalizability, enabling transferability to our unoccupied study area. We also used k-fold cross validation to evaluate our RSF and found it predicted habitat within the San Luis Reservoir herd well. The fit habitat relationships mostly followed expectations based on tule elk ecology, including positive responses to herbaceous vegetation cover and waterbody proximity, and negative responses to high tree cover and high puma habitat suitability. Our RSF accurately predicted currently occupied elk habitat as suitable and found well over 500,000 ha (2,000 mi2) of suitable but unoccupied habitat throughout the northern Diablo Range, the inland and coastal sides of the Santa Cruz Mountains, and the northern Santa Lucia Range. Assuming translocations, and construction and improvement of highway wildlife crossings, our results support the potential for re-establishing tule elk in these regions, which are more coastal and mesic than the species’ current habitat in the central Diablo and northern Gabilan ranges.