Data from: Synchronous effects produce cycles in deer populations and deer-vehicle collisions

Population cycles are fundamentally linked with spatial synchrony, the
prevailing paradigm being that populations with cyclic dynamics are easily
synchronized. That is, population cycles help give rise to spatial
synchrony. Here we demonstrate this process can work in reverse, with
synchrony causing population cycles. We show that timescale-specific
environmental effects, by synchronizing local population dynamics on
certain timescales only, cause major population cycles over large areas in
white-tailed deer. An important aspect of the new mechanism is specificity
of synchronizing effects to certain timescales, which causes local
dynamics to sum across space to a substantial cycle on those timescales.
We also demonstrate, to our knowledge for the first time, that synchrony
can be transmitted not only from environmental drivers to populations
(deer), but also from there to human systems (deer-vehicle collisions).
Because synchrony of drivers may be altered by climate change, changes to
population cycles may arise via our mechanism.