Spatial fidelity of skeletal remains: elk wintering and calving grounds revealed by bones on the Yellowstone landscape

Abstract

Abstract. The spatial distributions of bones on landscape surfaces (death assemblages) may contain high-quality data on species' landscape use. Previous investigations into the spatial fidelity of death assemblages focused on general habitat preferences of the source community. Using well-studied elk populations of Yellowstone National Park, I test the geographic sensitivity of death assemblages by assessing the fidelity of shed elk antlers to the distribution of bull elk in late winter (documented through aerial surveys). I also test the geographic fidelity of newborn calf bones to known calving areas. The spatial distribution of antlers is highly faithful to bull elk landscape use, describing the decadally averaged distribution of wintering grounds as well or better than individual aerial surveys. Discrepancies in geographic distributions between recent wintering patterns and the multidecadal antler assemblage also suggests differences in winter landscape use between current and historical (wolf-free) populations. Neonatal remains, including those partially consumed by carnivores, were always recovered in known calving areas, and all sampled calving grounds produced neonatal bones. Bone surveys are a new, minimally invasive, low-impact tool for obtaining high-quality historically informed data on species' geographic and habitat requirements. This tool will be particularly useful for managing sensitive species, fragile ecosystems, and poorly studied regions.

Antlers on the Arctic Refuge: capturing multi-generational patterns of calving ground use from bones on the landscape

“…Compared with the Yellowstone bone assemblage, the ANWR calving ground shows significantly higher relative abundances of neonatal MNI (Mann-Whitney U ¼ 128: p ¼ 0.021, one-tailed, figure 3b; electronic supplementary material, appendix C). While neonatal remains in Yellowstone are also faithful to known elk calving grounds [15], even localities with the highest relative abundances of neonatal MNI are below the median concentration of neonates in ANWR. Sample-size standardizing the Yellowstone plots further accentuates these differences (figure 3b, 'Yellowstone sample stand.…”

“…Interestingly, the Yellowstone plots closest to the maximum ANWR female antler concentration are from localities that are heavily used by bull elk during the late-winter period of maximum antler shedding [15]. Sample-size standardizing the Yellowstone plots to those of ANWR accentuates differences between the two localities (figure 3a, 'Yellowstone sample stand.').…”

“…In Yellowstone, newborn skeletal remains and shed male elk antlers faithfully record decadalscale patterns of landscape use, including elk calving areas and the relative importance of male elk wintering grounds [15]. However, differences between Yellowstone and ANWR in ungulate landscape use, migration patterns, population density and environment-driven bone weathering rates should produce characteristic dissimilarities between their death assemblages.…”

Exploring fall migratory patterns of American black ducks using eight decades of band-recovery data

“…However, although hunting activity could be particularly important when analyzing band recovery data at small spatial scales (i.e., at the county-or even state-scale; Calenge et al 2010), we suggest that their impacts may be dampened at flyway-scale analyses across multiple decades. Thus, at the broad spatial and temporal scales analyzed here, although hunter preferences or behaviors may change over time within a county, state, or even region, much of this high-frequency variability, and that associated with stochastic climatic events and population fluctuations, should be effectively averaged out (as observed in other studies of multi-decadal data; Western and Behrensmeyer 2009, Miller 2011, Behrensmeyer and Miller 2012, Miller 2012). This does not suggest that our analyses are free of bias (including hunter bias), but that our scale of analysis should limit some of their effects.…”

Regional-Scale Compositional and Size Fidelity of Rocky Intertidal Communities From the Patagonian Atlantic Coast

“…Determining how much of the biological signal reaches shell beds after the influence of biological and physical agents and time averaging, and how this preservability varies in time and space, remains one of the key steps in paleontological analysis (Fürsich 1978(Fürsich , 1995Kidwell 1985Kidwell , 1986Kidwell , 2001Kidwell et al 1986; Fü rsich and Aberhan 1990; Kidwell and Flessa 1995;Kowalewski et al 2003;Tomašových et al 2006). Previous contributions have found that there is fairly good agreement between the species composition of living assemblages (LAs) and the co-occurring death assemblages (DAs) in marine environments (e.g., Fü rsich and Flessa 1987; Kidwell 2001Kidwell , 2002Kidwell , 2013; see examples in Kidwell and Bosence 1991) as well as in other settings and/or taxa, such as land snails (Yanes et al 2008;Yanes 2011), fresh water mollusks (De Francesco et al 2013;Erthal et al 2011;Tietze and De Francesco 2012), marine mammals (Liebig et al 2003), ungulate mammals (Miller 2011(Miller , 2012, nonvolant terrestrial mammals , and small mammals (Terry 2010; see other examples in Kidwell and Tomašových 2013). However, the degree of similarity between living communities and the corresponding dead remains shows a large variation (Kidwell 2001), particularly among marine benthic communities (Kidwell and Bosence 1991;Zuschin et al 2000;Zuschin and Oliver 2003;Albano and Sabelli 2011;Feser and Miller 2014).…”