Ecology, 88(12), 2007, pp. 3192–3201 Ó 2007 by the Ecological Society of America LIFETIME REPRODUCTIVE SUCCESS AND COMPOSITION OF THE HOME RANGE IN A LARGE HERBIVORE P. D. MCLOUGHLIN, 1,6 J.-M. GAILLARD, 2 M. S. BOYCE, 3 C. BONENFANT, 2 F. MESSIER, 1 P. DUNCAN, 4 D. DELORME, 5 B. VAN MOORTER, 2 S. SAI ¨ D, 5 AND F. KLEIN 5 1 Department of Biology, University of Saskatchewan, 112 Science Place, Saskatoon SK S7N 5E2 Canada 2 Unite ´ Mixte de Recherche No. 5558, Biome ´trie et Biologie Evolutive, Ba ˆtiment 711, Universite ´ Claude Bernard Lyon 1, 43 Boulevard du 11 novembre 1918, FR-69622 Villeurbanne Cedex, France 3 Department of Biological Sciences, University of Alberta, Edmonton AB T6G 2E9 Canada 4 Centre d’Etudes Biologiques de Chize ´, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Villiers-en-Bois, 79360 Beauvoir/Niort, France 5 Office National de la Chasse et de la Faune Sauvage, Centre National d’Etudes et de Recherches Applique ´es Cervide ´s-Sanglier, 1 Place Exelmans, 55000 Bar-le-Duc, France Abstract. The relationship between individual performance and nonrandom use of habitat is fundamental to ecology; however, empirical tests of this relationship remain limited, especially for higher orders of selection like that of the home range. We quantified the association between lifetime reproductive success (LRS) and variables describing lifetime home ranges during the period of maternal care (spring to autumn) for 77 female roe deer (Capreolus capreolus) at Trois-Fontaines, Champagne-Ardenne, France (1976–2000). We maintained population growth rate (adjusted to account for removals of non-focal animals) near r max , which enabled us to define the fitness–habitat relationship in the absence of density effects. Using a negative binomial model, we showed that a roe deer’s incorporation into its home range of habitat components important to food, cover, and edge (meadows, thickets, and increased density of road allowances) was significantly related to LRS. Further, LRS decreased with increasing age of naturally reclaimed meadows at the time of a deer’s birth, which may have reflected a cohort effect related to, but not entirely explained by, a decline in quality of meadows through time. Predictive capacity of the selected model, estimated as the median correlation (r s ) between predicted and observed LRS among deer of cross-validation samples, was 0.55. The strength of this relationship suggests that processes like selection of the site of a home range during dispersal may play a more important role in determining fitness of individuals than previously thought. Individual fitness of highly sedentary income breeders with high reproductive output such as roe deer should be more dependent on home range quality during the period of maternal care compared to capital breeders with low reproductive output. Identification of the most important habitat attributes to survival and reproduction at low density (low levels of intraspecific competition) may prove useful for defining habitat value (‘‘intrinsic habitat value’’). Key words: Capreolus capreolus; fitness; habitat; home range; life history; lifetime reproductive success (LRS); resource selection function; roe deer; Trois-Fontaines, France. INTRODUCTION The relationship between individual performance and nonrandom use of habitat is fundamental to our understanding of ecology. For example, niche theory (Hutchinson 1957, Vandermeer 1972), optimal foraging (MacArthur and Pianka 1966, Fretwell and Lucas 1970, Charnov 1976, Orians and Pearson 1979), and source– sink dynamics (Pulliam 1988) are all based on fitness– habitat associations. The concept of scale is also key to our interpretation of ecological pattern and process (Wiens 1989, Levin 1992, Schneider 2001); however, empirical tests of theories based on the relationship between performance and habitat selection have largely been conducted at relatively small spatial and temporal scales (reviews in Rosenzweig 1981, 1991, Stephens and Krebs 1986, Morris 2003). Patterns measured at small scales do not necessarily hold at larger scales, nor do processes prevailing at small scales necessarily prevail at large scales (Schneider 2001). Recent empirical analyses (Pettorelli et al. 2005, McLoughlin et al. 2006) support the hypothesis that scale dependence in habitat selection is the result of scale dependence in the link between performance and habitat selection (Orians and Witten- berger 1991). Despite the large body of literature describing the hierarchical nature of habitat selection (Hall et al. 1997, Garshelis 2000, Manly et al. 2002), studies demonstrating how observed patterns in selec- tion might explain variation in performance at scales greater than that of the feeding site or patch continue to remain relatively uncommon. Moreover, after Morris (2006), we expect that processes operating over a long Manuscript received 28 November 2006; revised 9 April 2007; accepted 20 April 2007. Corresponding Editor: G. M. Henebry. 6 E-mail: mcloughlin@usask.ca 3192