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Context: Routine movements of large herbivores, often considered as ecosystem engineers, impact key ecological processes. Functional landscape connectivity for such species influences the spatial distribution of associated ecological services and disservices.Objectives: We studied how spatio-temporal variation in the risk-resource trade-off, generated by fluctuations in human activities and environmental conditions, influences the routine movements of roe deer across a heterogeneous landscape, generating shifts in functional connectivity at daily and seasonal time scales.Methods: We used GPS locations of 172 adult roe deer and step selection functions to infer landscape connectivity. In particular, we assessed the influence of six habitat features on fine scale movements across four biological seasons and three daily periods, based on variations in the risk-resource trade-off.Results: The influence of habitat features on roe deer movements was strongly dependent on proximity to refuge habitat, i.e. woodlands. Roe deer confined their movements to safe habitats during daytime and during the hunting season, when human activity is high. However, they exploited exposed open habitats more freely during night-time. Consequently, we observed marked temporal shifts in landscape connectivity, which was highest at night in summer and lowest during daytime in autumn. In particular, the onset of the autumn hunting season induced an abrupt decrease in landscape connectivity.Conclusions: Human disturbance had a strong impact on roe deer movements, generating pronounced spatio-temporal variation in landscape connectivity. However, high connectivity at night across all seasons implies that Europe’s most abundant and widespread large herbivore potentially plays a key role in transporting ticks, seeds and nutrients among habitats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parasite abundance has been shown to have major consequences for host fitness components such as survival and reproduction. However, although natal dispersal is a key life history trait, whether an individual's decision to disperse or not is influenced by the abundance of parasites it carries remains mostly unknown. Current and opposing hypotheses suggest that infected individuals should either be philopatric to avoid the energetic costs of dispersal (condition dependence) or disperse to escape from heavily parasitised habitats. From intensive monitoring of a roe deer population inhabiting a multi-use and spatially heterogeneous agricultural landscape, we evaluated the link between an individual's parasite abundance and its propensity to disperse, while accounting for confounding effects of body mass. Dispersal propensity generally decreased with both increasing nematode abundance and with decreasing body mass. Within the dispersing segment of the population, individuals with high nematode abundance left their natal home range later in the season than less parasitised deer. These results clearly show that parasite abundance is an important component of condition-dependent dispersal in large herbivores. However, unexpectedly, three individuals that were both heavily parasitised and of low body mass dispersed. We suggest that this 'leave it' response to high parasite levels in the natal habitat could represent a last ditch attempt to improve reproductive prospects, constituting a form of emergency life history strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Natal dispersal is defined as the movement between the natal range and the site of first breeding and is one of the most important processes in population dynamics. The choice an individual makes between dispersal and philopatry may be condition dependent, influenced by either phenotypic attributes and/or environmental factors., Interindividual variability in dispersal tactics has profound consequences for population dynamics, particularly with respect to metapopulation maintenance. A better understanding of the mechanisms underlying this variability is thus of primary interest., We investigated the ranging behaviour of 60 juvenile European roe deer, Capreolus capreolus, monitored with GPS collars for 1 year prior to their first reproduction, from 2003 to 2010 in South- West France. Dispersal occurs across a spatial continuum so that dividing individuals into two categories (dispersers vs. philopatric) may lead to information loss. Therefore, to investigate condition-dependent dispersal more accurately, we developed an individual-based measure of dispersal distance, which took into account interindividual variation in ranging behaviour. We assessed the influence of body mass, the degree of habitat heterogeneity and sex on dispersal initiation date, dispersal propensity and distance., The overall population dispersal rate was 0·34, with a mean ± SD linear distance between natal and post-dispersal home ranges of 12·3 ± 10·5 km. Dispersal distances followed a classical leptokurtic distribution. We found no sex bias in either dispersal rate or distance. Forest animals dispersed less than those living in more heterogeneous habitats. Heavier individuals dispersed with a higher probability, earlier and further than lighter individuals. Our individual-based standardised dispersal distance increased linearly with body mass, with some suggestion of a body mass threshold of 14 kg under which no individual dispersed., Natal dispersal in roe deer was thus dependent on both phenotypic attributes and environmental context. Our results suggest that population connectivity can be altered by a change in average body condition and is likely higher in the rich and heterogeneous habitats typical of modern day agricultural landscapes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forest fragmentation may benefit generalist herbivores by increasing access to various substitutable food resources, with potential consequences for their population dynamics. We studied a European roe deer ( Capreolus capreolus) population living in an agricultural mosaic of forest, woodlots, meadows and cultivated crops. We tested whether diet composition and quality varied spatially across the landscape using botanical analyses of rumen contents and chemical analyses of the plants consumed in relation to landscape metrics. In summer and non-mast winters, roe deer ate more cultivated seeds and less native forest browse with increasing availability of crops in the local landscape. This spatial variation resulted in contrasting diet quality, with more cell content and lower lignin and hemicellulose content (high quality) for individuals living in more open habitats. The pattern was less marked in the other seasons when diet composition, but not diet quality, was only weakly related to landscape structure. In mast autumns and winters, the consumption of acorns across the entire landscape resulted in a low level of differentiation in diet composition and quality. Our results reflect the ability of generalist species, such as roe deer, to adapt to the fragmentation of their forest habitat by exhibiting a plastic feeding behavior, enabling them to use supplementary resources available in the agricultural matrix. This flexibility confers nutritional advantages to individuals with access to cultivated fields when their native food resources are depleted or decline in quality (e.g. during non-mast years) and may explain local heterogeneities in individual phenotypic quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Body size of large herbivores is a crucial life history variable influencing individual fitness-related traits. While the importance of this parameter in determining temporal trends in population dynamics is well established, much less information is available on spatial variation in body size at a local infra-population scale. The relatively recent increase in landscape fragmentation over the last century has lead to substantial spatial heterogeneity in habitat quality across much of the modern agricultural landscape. In this paper, we analyse variation in body mass and size of roe deer inhabiting a heterogeneous agricultural landscape characterised by a variable degree of woodland fragmentation. We predicted that body mass should vary in relation to the degree of access to cultivated meadows and crops providing high quality diet supplements. In support of our prediction, roe deer body mass increased along a gradient of habitat fragmentation, with the heaviest deer occurring in the most open sectors and the lightest in the strict forest environment. These spatial differences were particularly pronounced for juveniles, reaching >3 kg (ca 20% of total body mass) between the two extremes of this gradient, and likely have a marked impact on individual fates. We also found that levels of both nitrogen and phosphorous were higher in deer faecal samples in the more open sectors compared to the forest environment, suggesting that the spatial patterns in body mass could be linked to the availability of high quality feeding habitat provided by the cultivated agricultural plain. Finally, we found that adults in the forest sector were ca 1 kg lighter for a given body size than their counterparts in the more open sectors, suggesting that access to nutrient rich foods allowed deer to accumulate substantial fat reserves, which is unusual for roe deer, with likely knock-on effects for demographic traits and, hence, population dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The balance between resource acquisition and risk avoidance should vary according to personality type, with potential knock-on effects for fitness. Although previous studies have suggested a link between boldness and fitness components, little evidence is available on the behavioural mechanisms mediating this relationship in the wild. Because habitat use is the outcome of the trade-off between the costs and benefits associated with using each habitat type, we evaluated between-individual differences in habitat use of 64 GPS-collared female roe deer, Capreolus capreolus , using multinomial logit mixed models. To investigate whether deer differed in their habitat use tactics in relation to their personality type and their annual reproductive success, we assessed the link between individual habitat use patterns, boldness (measured as the strength of behavioural responsiveness to handling) and annual reproductive success (measured by the presence/absence of fawns at heel during autumn). Although daily and seasonal variations in the risk–resource landscapes clearly drove patterns of habitat use, individuals adopted contrasting habitat use tactics depending on their position along the shy–bold gradient and their reproductive status. Shy individuals occupied safer woodland more frequently, even at night when risk is lower. In contrast, bold individuals were better able to exploit rich open habitats. When this included mature autumn crops, these females weaned more offspring. Finally, irrespective of personality type, females that used meadows more often also achieved higher annual reproductive success. Overall, we demonstrate that individuals express divergent habitat use tactics as a function of their ability to avoid exposure to risk and their annual reproductive success. Highlights • We measured habitat use, boldness and reproductive success in 64 female roe deer. • Spatiotemporal variations in the risk-resource trade-off shape deer habitat use. • The way individuals use their environment also depends on their personality type. • Differences in habitat use between personalities are linked to reproductive success. • Individual habitat use tactics mediate the personality – fitness link in the wild. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]