Data from: Food for fitness? Insights from 24 Norwegian moose populations for proactive monitoring and preventing overabundance

Cervid (Cervidae) populations that are overabundant with respect to their
food resources are expected to show declining physiological and
reproductive fitness. A proactive solution to such declines is to
integrate the monitoring of food resources with animal harvesting
strategies, but there are few studies available to guide managers
regarding which food resources to monitor and how to do so. In this study,
we used a rare large data set that included detailed absolute measures of
available food quantities and browsing intensity from field inventories,
to test their relationship with fitness indices of moose Alces alces in 24
management units in four regions across Norway. The Dryad deposited
dataset includes detailed data from these food inventories, and harvesting
statistics from all the management units with a total of 250,710 moose
seen, 32,756 moose shot, and 4,209 moose calves weighed. It also contains
regional statistics on calves seen per cow during a total
of 2,475,483 hunter 8-h days, and 34,532 moose calves weighed.
Explanation of each data type is given alongside the data. Additional
information on how the data was collected is found in the accompanying
journal article.