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

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.37pvmcvxn](10.5061/dryad.37pvmcvxn)

## Description of the data and file structure

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.

### Files and variables

#### File: WamEtAl_FoodForFitness_Dryad.xlsx

**Description:** The excel file contain...,