White‐tailed deer preferentially use areas with greater anthropogenic development in a suburban metropark system

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Abstract Urban expansion and anthropogenic development result in wildlife‐habitat loss and fragmentation, increased human–wildlife conflicts, and biodiversity loss across the globe. However, some animal species are well adapted to anthropogenic land use and find novel foraging opportunities or refuge from predation in urban and suburban areas. White‐tailed deer ( Odocoileus virginianus ) are abundant in suburban landscapes throughout much of North America and persist at high densities, which causes harmful effects on surrounding plant communities. Using a large camera‐trapping dataset ( n = 207 camera traps over a 365‐day sampling period), we quantified white‐tailed deer detection rates in various anthropogenic and natural habitat types in the Cleveland Metroparks, an expansive metropolitan park system. We examined whether deer detection rates varied among habitat types during the summer forage, pre‐rut/rut, winter forage, and fawning periods. We also investigated how deer detection rates varied in response to enhanced vegetation index (EVI) values and coyote detection rates during each of these periods. Throughout the year, we found that deer detection rates were greater at camera stations with an abundance of herbaceous and shrubby wetlands, low‐to‐moderate amounts of anthropogenically developed land use (such as residential housing areas), and herbaceous and woody developed areas (e.g., lawns, picnic areas, or sports fields). During the pre‐rut/rut period, deer detection rates were greater in areas with higher EVI values, which suggests that deer may have been searching out areas with green forage as plants senesced during autumn. Deer detection rates were positively associated with coyote activity during the fawning period, which indicates that coyotes and deer were using the same areas at this time of year, or that deer were more active in an attempt to evade coyotes. We suggest that metropolitan parks will experience high deer densities that lead to degraded forest ecosystems due to foraging subsidies that are provided by adjacent residential land use and an abundance of anthropogenically modified green spaces within and around metropolitan parks.

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