When Hurricane Irma made landfall in Florida in September 2017, the Category 5 storm offered a team of wildlife researchers a first-ever opportunity to observe behavioral responses of white-tailed deer to an extreme weather event in real time.
When Hurricane Irma made landfall in Florida in September 2017, the Category 5 storm offered a team of wildlife researchers a first-ever opportunity to observe behavioral responses of white-tailed deer to an extreme weather event in real time. The data collected are providing crucial new insights for scientists seeking to minimize the impacts of severe weather and climate change on wildlife.
Heather Abernathy, a doctoral student in the College of Natural Resources and Environment, detailed the group’s findings in a recent issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a key biological research journal.
The paper is one outcome from a large, ongoing collaborative study of white-tailed deer population dynamics as well as interactions between white-tailed deer and Florida panther in southwestern Florida by Virginia Tech, the University of Georgia, and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
Since 2015, researchers have been monitoring white-tailed deer using GPS collars to track their movements through the Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge and the northern management units of Big Cypress National Preserve. As Hurricane Irma made landfall, the team was able to track the movements of individual white-tailed deer in real time utilizing satellite data transmitted from the GPS collars every four hours.
Read more at Virginia Tech
Photo: These two white-tailed deer, a fawn on the left and a female wearing a GPS collar on the right, were observed during an aerial survey in Florida’s Big Cypress National Preserve. Photo by Elina Garrison, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
