Pronghorn movements and mortality during extreme weather highlight the importance of landscape connectivity
Description
This dataset accompanies the paper: Aikens, E.O., J. A. Merkle, W. Xu and H. Sawyer (2025). Escape movements during extreme weather highlight the critical importance of connectivity. Current Biology. Paper Summary: Human disturbance and development are fragmenting landscapes, limiting the ability of organisms to freely move to meet their survival and reproductive needs. Simultaneously, extreme weather events – such as tropical cyclones, megafires, and heatwaves – pose a major threat to survival and may require animals to rapidly move to escape. As the dual forces of landscape fragmentation and extreme weather events continue to intensify, researchers urgently need to develop an understanding of the synergistic effects of these forces on animal mobility and survival. Here, we present a case study on pronghorn (Antilocapra americana) that undertook extraordinary long-distance movements (up to 399 km) to escape a once-in-two-decade extreme snowstorm in the Red Desert, WY, USA. Although Wyoming is a seemingly underdeveloped landscape, high fence density and two major highways in the region exposed pronghorn to novel barriers that delayed movement, restricted habitat access, and ultimately hindered their ability to escape extreme snow accumulation. The synergistic effects of movement barriers and extreme weather increased mortality rates by 3.7-fold such that over 50% of GPS-monitored pronghorn perished. These findings highlight the critical need to study escape movements and prioritize connectivity planning to curtail mass mortality events and ensure population persistence.
Files
Institutions
- University of WyomingWY, Laramie