Huangnihe Nature Reserve is located in the northwest of Dunhua City, Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, Jilin Province. As a provincial level nature reserve, it was built to protect the north temperate mountain forest ecosystems and a variety of rare and endangered wild animals and plants. According to the population and distribution of roe deer (Capreolus capreolus) in Huangnihe Nature Reserve, line transect method was used in the region which roe deer move frequently, i.e., sample points was selected randomly on the forest map. And then 47 line transects was set along with the vertical direction of the contour. Span is above 1 500 m, length is 3-5 km of the line transect which covered the major vegetation types of protected areas.
Because of heavy snow in the high altitudes regions, most of line transects were below 900 m above sea level, only one transect was above 900 m, the highest point of the transect was 943 m, the snow was 86 cm thick. Roe deer lying track was set as the center for a 2 m × 2 m and a 10 m × 10 m quadrats when it was found during the field investigation, and the quadrat center was located with GPS. At the same time, a 2 m × 2 m and 10 m × 10 m quadrats was set every 1000 m of walking as control during the field investigation. If there is a roe deer lying track, then control quadrats statistics will be give up, just for lying track quadrats statistics.
Seventy two quadrats used by roe deer and 109 control quadrats were measured during 47 line transect surveys with 179.2 km total length and, the effects of 15 ecological factors, namely elevation, slope direction, gradient, slope location, canopy, thickets coverage, hiding level, food abundance, distance far from human disturbance, diameter at breast height, forest type, conifer, snow depth, fallen tree and bare rock, on winter bed-site selection by roe deer were evaluated in this research totally. Comparing used quadrats with control quadrats through Baileys Confidence Interval Discriminate combining with two-sample Mann-Whitney rank test, the results indicated that significant differences were observed in selection of elevation, slope direction, slope location, canopy, thickets coverage, hiding level, food abundance, forest type, conifer, snow depth and bare rock by roe deer. Roe deer preferred the mixed broadleaf-coniferous forest habitats located in sunny middle slope, average elevation of 591m, lower snow depth, adequate food resources, thickets coverage, canopy density and hiding conditions, especially preferred conifers in mixed forest for rest while avoided habitats with shady slope, typical coniferous forest and bare rocks. Half sunny slope, broad-leaved forest, gradient, distance far from human disturbance and diameter at breast height as well as fallen tree were selected by roe deer randomly. The Binary Logistic Regression demonstrated that food abundance, conifer, snow depth, bare rock and elevation were the dominant factors leading important roles during the process of winter bed-site selection by roe deer, and forest type, slope direction and hiding level were the secondary factors. A Binary Logistic Model could be constructed by these 7 factors as follow: z= 32.628+11.675× slope direction (1)+9.741× slope direction(2) -5.486× forest type(1) -7.933× forest type(2)-7.496× bare rock(1) -9.906× conifer(1) -0.043 ×elevation+0.170×hiding level +0.220×food abundance -0.429×snow depth. The selection probability was that: P(z)= e^z/1+e^z. The model could predict correctly with 96.1% of overall.