Small shrubs with large importance? Smaller deer may increase the moose-forestry conflict through feeding competition over Vaccinium shrubs in the field layer

The moose (Alces alces) is a dominant large mammalian herbivore in the world’s boreal zones. Moose exert significant browsing impacts on forest vegetation and are therefore often at centre of wildlife-forestry conflicts. Consequently, understanding drivers their foraging behaviour crucial for mitigating such Management parts its range currently largely ignores fact that influenced by increasing populations sympatric deer species. In multispecies systems, resource partitioning may be driven height bite size. Feeding competition with smaller species might replace larger from field layer drive them towards higher strata offering bites. This size hypothesis has been well documented African ungulate communities. Based diet DNA metabarcoding dataset we suggest feeding three (red Cervus elaphus, fallow Dama dama, roe Capreolus capreolus) over Vaccinium shrubs consumption Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris) Sweden. We found areas high density, diets consistently contained less proportions spring periods. Utilization these food items was either unaffected density or, showed opposite pattern to moose, i.e., increases red density. Availability Vaccinium, measured as proportion available bites, did not explain observed patterns. Our results managing key like play an important role controlling pine.