Deer dietary responses to wildfire: optimal foraging, individual specialization, or opportunism?

Increasing impacts of wildfire on arid regions of the world fueled by climate change highlight the need to better understand how natural communities respond to fire.  While plant communities have received much attention, less is known about responses of keystone herbivores, such as ungulates.  Large herbivores may temporarily vacate burned areas as vegetation decreases, returning as vegetation recovers, and concentrating in burn areas as early successional herbaceous species begin to flourish.  However, few data exist to assess herbivore trophic niches in burned and unburned habitats.  We took advantage of a large (1,660-km2) wildfire that erupted in northern California during an in-progress study of black-tailed deer (Odocoileus hemionus columbianus) to investigate deer use of and diets within burned and unburned habitats before and after the fire.  Depending on whether deer diet selection conformed better to optimal foraging models (including the niche variation hypothesis), or to tha..., , All data can be accessed with any text editor or spreadsheet software. Analysis scripts are for use in open source software, including DAD2 and R. , # Deer dietary responses to wildfire: optimal foraging, individual specialization, or opportunism?

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This accession includes all of the raw sequencing reads for samples and controls used in the study, along with an ASV table(ASV_counts.txt) and ASV sequences (ASV.fa), output from DADA2. The sample names referenced in the ASV table correspond to the names of the fastq files, each of which corresponds to a single sample or control.

## Description of the data and file structure

### **Fastq files (n = 865)**:

Each fastq file contains all of the raw forward sequencing reads for a single pellet group sample or control sample. The first portion of the filename contains the sample name, which can be cross-referenced with the ASV table and other data files listed below.

Conventions for names are

Samples: Sxx_xxxx, where x = a numeral, e.g., S20_1660
Replicated samples extracted for surface of pellet: SSxx_xxxx
Replicated samples extracted for interior of pellet: SIxx_xxxx
No-template ...