Abstract
BackgroundClimate is an important driver of ungulate life-histories, population dynamics, and migratory behaviors, and can affect the growth, development, fecundity, dispersal, and demographic trends of populations. Changes in temperature and precipitation, and resulting shifts in plant phenology, winter severity, drought and wildfire conditions, invasive species distribution and abundance, predation, and disease have the potential to directly or indirectly affect ungulates. However, ungulate responses to climate variability and change are not uniform and vary by species and geography. Here, we present a systematic map protocol aiming to describe the abundance and distribution of evidence on the effects of climate variability and change on ungulate life-histories, population dynamics, and migration in North America. This map will help to identify knowledge gaps and clusters of evidence, and can be used to inform future research directions and adaptive management strategies.MethodsWe will catalogue evidence on how climate variability and change affect the life-histories, population dynamics, and migration patterns of the fifteen ungulate species native to North America. We will search both academic and grey literature, using academic journal databases and specialist websites. Articles will be screened for inclusion at the title/abstract and full-text levels, and data will be extracted from articles that pass the full-text review. These data will be summarized quantitatively, visually, and with a narrative review to describe the distribution and abundance of evidence on the effects of climate variability and change on ungulates in North America.
Highlights
Climate is an important driver of ungulate life-histories, population dynamics, and migratory behaviors, and can affect the growth, development, fecundity, dispersal, and demographic trends of populations
Native ungulate species occupy a diversity of habitats across North America, from Canada’s high arctic to the deserts of Mexico [1]
Climate is an important driver of ungulate life-history characteristics, population dynamics, and migratory behaviors and changes in climate can directly or indirectly affect the growth, development, fecundity, dispersal, demographic trends, and long-term viability of populations [9, 13] as well as the timing and locations of migratory movements [14, 15]
Summary
The review will follow the Collaboration for Environmental Evidence Guidelines and Standards for Evidence Synthesis in Environmental Management [34], and conform to the ROSES reporting standards [35] (Additional file 1). Plant phenology is a known driver of ungulate migration in North America [36, 37] and is inherently linked to climate, in particular to temperature [38, 39] Due to this inherent link, our direct climate variable terms may not be present in the title or abstract of relevant articles addressing ungulates and plant phenology, and as such could be missed by our search string if phenology were not included as a term. An article describing the impacts of a temperature-driven change in disease transmission on mule deer would be captured by the final search string, due to the presence of the terms “mule deer” and “temperature” To test this assumption, we ran separate searches that included all population variables, direct climate variables, and each of the four remaining secondary variables, one at a time (Additional file 2). The full database containing the information extracted from each study will be made available for download
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