Pheasants 365: A review of seasonal ring-necked pheasant habitat in central North America

Ring-necked pheasants, an economically important game species in North America, are facing population declines in agriculturally dominated areas due to intensification of production systems. There is a significant body of research on pheasant habitat requirements, much of which aims to address declines by guiding management decisions to improve habitat conditions. Pheasants, like many species, have differing resource needs throughout the year based on their life history and seasonal changes to the landscape; however, many studies have only focused on one or two of the three key ecological seasons – breeding, brood-rearing, or overwintering. We conducted a literature review using the Web of Science database to synthesize results from studies investigating pheasant habitat in central North America in a seasonal context in order to provide a year-round perspective on pheasant habitat management. Our results show the importance of grasslands and small grains during nesting and brood-rearing..., The geographic scope of this review was the Great Plains and Midwest Region of the United States. In recognition of the variability and subjectivity in delineating the boundaries of these regions, we used the Great Plains Region outlined by Lavin et al. (2011) and the Midwest Region definition provided by National Geographic (O’Conner, 2024). Notably, there is an overlap between the two regions, with portions of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas occurring in both regions. We specified the combined extent of these regions as our study area due to their relative similarities in land use, topography, and climate, as well as history of supporting pheasant populations. The temporal extent of the review was from 1970 – 2023.
A systematic literature search was conducted according to the PRISMA guidelines for ecology and evolution (O’Dea et al., 2021) using the Web of Science ‘all databases’ search function. Search terms and Boolean operators used are reported in Table 1. Subsequ..., , # Data from: Pheasants 365: A review of seasonal ring-necked pheasant habitat in central North America

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.j3tx95xr4](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.j3tx95xr4)

## Description of the data and file structure

This data was collected as part of a comprehensive literature review titled \"Pheasants 365: A review of seasonal ring-necked pheasant habitat in central North America\" by Barg *et al* (2025). This review collected published, peer-reviewed literature regarding ring-necked pheasant habitat in the Great Plains and Midwestern North America in order to identify seasonal trends and locate gaps in our knowledge of seasonal pheasant habitat. The data was collected from the Web of Science using boolean search terms regarding pheasants and habitat, and then the data was manually filtered to select relevant studies based on a set of predetermined criteria. The Excel file lists the final sixty-five studies that were found to meet the requirements of the review. The st...,