ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a framework for determining landscape capability for white-tailed deer across peri-urban landscapes by: analyzing the distribution of important land cover and land uses from classified, high-resolution imagery; developing and validating models of landscape capability for deer as functions of land cover composition; and, exploring the correlation between sampled land uses and land cover in heterogeneous, peri-urban landscapes of three upstate New York metropolitan areas, USA. It locates the location of three upstate New York towns for modelling landscape capability for urban ungulates. The chapter explores landscape capability through parametric modelling of deer counts, while accounting for imperfect detection and zero-inflation for both Irondequoit and DeWitt. The chapter attributes the significance of zero-inflation terms in our models to over-dispersion caused by: extreme variation in landscape capability over very short spatial extents; counting deer in large survey units where either many or no deer were detected.
