Data products from publication "Movement models and simulation reveal highway impacts and mitigation opportunities for a metapopulation-distributed species" (Aiello et al. In Press, Landscape Ecology)

This collection includes 10 spatial data products from the manuscript: Movement models and simulation reveal highway impacts and mitigation opportunities for a metapopulation-distributed species. <br> Data are provided as GeoTiff file(s) with extension .tif using the WGS 84 coordinate reference system (EPSG: 4326). GeoTiff file names start with a 4-letter code that indicates the mountain range associated with the data, e.g. SODS_SimUD.tif refers to the simulation-based utilization distribution for the South Soda Mountains where simulation results were averaged across all study animals attributed to that range. The file named studyAveragedSimUD.tif refers to the simulation results averaged across all study animals (41 bighorn from 9 unique ranges). <br> Each range-specific raster consists of 250 x 250 m grid cells and includes two bands of data named "with highway" (Band_1) and "without highway" (Band_2). The band names refer to the conditions under which the author simulated bighorn sheep movement. In some programs, the names will only display as Band_1 or Band_2. "With highway" (Band_1) refers to the inclusion of major interstate highways I-15 and I-40 and their associated barrier effects to bighorn movement within the simulation model (i.e., model parameters that indicate bighorn are reluctant to move to locations close to the highway and avoid crossing the highway). "Without highway" (Band_2) refers to simulations conducted without the highway barrier effect, which equates to simulating bighorn movement as if the highways were not present on the landscape. Within each band of range-specific GeoTiff files, each raster cell has a value ranging from 1 to 10, which is a rank given to the cell based on the frequency of simulated movements that moved through that cell. Based on our comparisons of simulation ranks and recorded bighorn movements, cells ranked 8 - 10 predict areas of regular use by bighorn with the predicted intensity or frequency of use increasing as rank values increase. Cells ranked below 8 are predicted to have occasional to increasingly rare use by bighorn sheep as rank values decrease. <br> The file studyAveragedSimUD.tif consists of one band of data for the "without highway" simulation condition. Raster cell values range from 1 – 20, and cells ranked &gt; 15 predict areas of regular use by bighorn and ranks ≤ 15 indicate occasional to increasingly rare use by bighorn sheep as rank values decrease. Cells with no value (NA) were never visited during simulations.