INFLUENCE OF CLIMATIC AND LOCAL ENVIRONMENTAL CONDITIONS ON DEER: COMPARISON BETWEEN AIR TEMPERATURES MEASURED BY A WEATHER STATION AND GPS COLLARS

Climatic and local environmental conditions, particularly during summer and winter (Anderson et al., 2009), affect critically the habits of wild ungulates, conditioning their ranging behaviour, the size and distribution of the home range (Rivrud et al., 2010) as well as their movement rates in different land cover types (van Beest et al., 2013). Knowing the exact local meteorological conditions could help understand and predict the extent of these effects; GPS collars are frequently equipped with a temperature sensor that provide the animal-level environmental temperature monitoring. However, several bias connected with the features of the sensor construction might exist. In this work we tried to test the reliability of the sensors comparing them to weather station data.