Recreational trail traffic counts and trail proximity as a driver of ungulate landscape utilization

With continual growth in recreational trail use, it is becoming increasingly complicated to balance demands for outdoor recreation opportunities with wildlife conservation. To better understand how mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) and Rocky Mountain elk (Cervus canadensis) respond to trail-based recreation, we deployed remote cameras in a paired study design to assess ungulate encounter rates relative to recreation traffic counts and distance from trails. Our methodology allowed us to estimate the magnitude of human activity on public land trails which can be challenging, but is a key step in understanding recreational effects on animal utilization, especially if any interaction in trail proximity and human traffic rates exist. Paired cameras provided a comparison of animal encounter rates on and off-trail at varying trail proximities, and the on-trail camera also yielded daily recreation traffic counts to assess how animals respond to varying traffic for each camera pair. Elk avoided bu..., Detection data from camera trap photographs. Cameras were deployed in paired study design on- and off-trails to simulatenously collect animal and recreation data. This repository includes:

the raw detection data (after images were processed using the CPW Photo Warehouse) (FlatDetectionFile_20210329.csv)
R object named 'Daily' prepared for analysis containing daily recreation traffic, daily ungulate encounters, and environmental covariates for each camera (location data removed) (Daily_20250502.rda)
, , # Recreational trail traffic counts and trail proximity as a driver of ungulate landscape utilization

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.80gb5mkz9](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.80gb5mkz9)

We have submitted our raw detection data (after images were processed using the CPW Photo Warehouse, FlatDetectionFile_20210329.csv) and the prepared dataset (Daily_20250502.rda) at the daily resolution, and used for analysis.

## Descriptions

### FlatDetectionFile\_20210329.csv

Raw detection data after camera images were processed using the CPW Photo Warehouse (UTM identifiers removed).

* **GroupID**: Integer, ID representing a group of paired camera
* **LocationName**: Text (String), Concatenated location name containing GroupID and camera distance to trail where zero is the on-trail camera (e.g., \"151_0\")
* **FileName**: Text (String), Image filename
* **ImageDate**: DateTime, Date and time the image was captured (MM/DD/YYYY H:MM:SS, timezone = \"MST\")
* **DetectionID**: Text (String), Unique ident...,