Starkey Experimental Forest and Range: fences and pastures 1987–2017

The Starkey Experimental Forest and Range (EFR) is located 28 miles southwest of La Grande in northeast Oregon. This unique research facility includes ungulate-proof fencing enclosing 40 square miles, as well as interior fencing, to provide control of herbivory effects and the abundance and distribution of large herbivores (cattle, mule deer, and elk). The Starkey Project is a multi-year research effort starting in 1989 that relies on the fencing and resulting pastures of the EFR to measure the population responses of deer and elk to various forest and rangeland management practices commonly applied on public lands. This data publication contains a vector-based polygon file which includes all the fences and pastures on this EFR between 1987 and 2017, including 8-foot game-proof and 4-foot barbed-wire cattle fences as well as animal exclosures and enclosures larger than 1 acre. This file also includes the year of fence construction and removal, which enables the viewing of pastures and fences present for a given year. Pasture names and other relevant attributes such as perimeter and area are included.
Over the course of its long-term study of elk, mule deer, and cattle, the Starkey Ungulate Ecology Team (SUET; a research team within the USDA Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station) has used these fences to partition the Starkey EFR into tracts of land from which different groups of animals can be excluded, or included, as part of the research design. The fences are central to the Starkey EFR’s objective, allowing the herds of elk, mule deer, and cattle to be monitored in a closed environment. The enclosure and exclosure fences were built within the EFR to allow for the manipulation of forest and rangeland vegetation, animal distributions and abundance, recreation impacts (including from hunting), and traffic rates. See Rowland et al. (1997) and Wisdom et al. (2005) for details regarding The Starkey Project’s research objectives and studies conducted as part of this long-term data collection. Rowland, Mary M.; Bryant, Larry D.; Johnson, Bruce K.; Noyes, James H.; Wisdom, Michael J.; Thomas, Jack Ward. 1997. The Starkey project: history, facilities, and data collection methods for ungulate research. Gen. Tech. Rep. PNW-GTR-396. Portland, OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station. 62 p. https://doi.org/10.2737/pnw-gtr-396 Wisdom, Michael. J.; Rowland, Mary M.; Johnson, Bruce K.; Dick, Brian L. 2005. Overview of the Starkey Project: Mule Deer and Elk Research for Management Benefits. Pages 17-28 in Wisdom, Michael J., technical editor, The Starkey Project: a synthesis of long-term studies of elk and mule deer. Reprinted from the 2004 Transactions of the North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference, Alliance Communications Group, Lawrence, Kansas, USA.
Original metadata date was 03/29/2018. Minor metadata updates made on 05/29/2018.