Recently large mammals including deer and wild boars are increasing and expanding their distribution ranges. Because they often cause serious damage to crops and natural vegetation, implementing the effective management of these mammals is a pressing issue for local governments.

We propose a novel model to estimate species distribution and demographic parameters, which is necessary to predict the spread of large mammals at fine spatial scales. To demonstrate the usefulness of our model, we first examined whether our model can estimate species distribution and demographic parameters with sufficient precision using test data generated from hypothetical simulations. Second, we applied sika deer data in the field and predicted the change in the distribution of this mammal over ten years. This sika deer data was collected by local government in Chiba during 1996-2011.

Our model is robust to sparsely distributed data points and is able to take account of the effect of environmental heterogeneity on animal movements.