Hierarchy in structuring of resource selection: Understanding elk selection across space, time, and movement strategies

Movement is a fundamental aspect of animal ecology that varies across space, time, and among individuals or groups within a population. Broad scale patterns of animal movement are often classified into different movement strategies such as resident, nomadic, and migratory. While landscape-level environmental patterns can predict the presence of different movement strategies in an area, elucidating how these patterns downscale to fine-scale resource selection behaviors remains a challenge. Partially migratory systems, where both migrants and residents coexist, offer a unique opportunity to address these questions. Using tracking data from four Rocky Mountain elk (Cervus canadensis) herds situated primarily within Colorado, USA, we assessed between-herd, seasonal, and within-herd variation in resource selection behavior. We modelled fine-scale seasonal resource selection and compared strategy-specific behaviors using resource selection functions. Additionally, we used a consistency score ..., , , # Data from: Hierarchy in structuring of resource selection: Understanding elk selection across space, time, and movement strategies

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.zkh1893mp](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.zkh1893mp)

## Description of the data and file structure

Crews, S., N. D. Rayl, M. W. Alldredge, E. J. Bergman, C. R. Anderson Jr., E. H. VanNatta, J. D. Holbrook, and G. Bastille-Rousseau. Hierarchy in structuring of resource selection: understanding elk selection across space, time, and movement strategies. *Ecology and Evolution*.

**Crews_etal_Elk_RSF_Hierarchy_Data.csv file** with 10677684 rows and 16 columns. Rows contain covariate information for 1306349 used and 9371335 available elk locations from 386 adult female elk monitored in 4 herds in and around Colorado, USA from March 4, 2017 - April 14, 2022. Note that these locations exclude periods categorized as ‘migration’, which were used in the classification of movement strategies, but not in generation of resource selectio...