Fig 1.
Estimated historical distribution of California’s three elk subspecies.
Rocky Mountain elk (yellow) shown in northeastern California north of the Sierra Nevada, Roosevelt elk (blue) in northwestern California, and tule elk (pink) in California’s Central Valley and central coast regions. As shown, the Sierra Nevada were excluded from historical elk range. Reprinted from CDFW Elk Conservation and Management Plan under a CC BY license, with permission from CDFW, original copyright 2018.
Fig 2.
Map depicting locations of six nineteenth century elk observer records at four locations “H”: Honey Lake, Lake Tahoe, Round Valley, and the Bear River canyon in the Sierra Nevada.
Solid line depicts the boundaries of the Sierra Nevada in California and Nevada [39]. Two Late Holocene zooarchaeological records of elk “Z” are located in the extreme northwest Great Basin, just north of the Sierra Nevada. Habitat suitability is reflected by the contemporary presence “C” of breeding elk today in the northern Sierra Nevada south to Stampede Reservoir and the southern Sierra Nevada north to Lake Isabella. The dispersal of a bull elk to St. Mary’s Pass “C” south of Lake Tahoe is also noted. Images in map collected from public domain open sources (Esri, CGIAR, USGS).
Table 1.
Summary of historical observer records of elk hunts in the Sierra Nevada.