FIGURE 4.

(a) PCA results illustrating the nutritional composition of 12 common moose food plants in Sweden, using the mean composition (% dm, estimated by wet chemistry) of six nutritional constituents (loading plot). Edible parts of twigs and/or needles edible were sampled in winter (March 2015). The first principal component (PC1, x‐axis) depicts variation in total nonstructural carbohydrates (TNC1, increasing values to the left), cellulose, and hemicellulose (both with increasing values to the right). The second principal component (PC2, y‐axis) depicts variation in lignin (increasing values upwards) and available protein (AP, increasing values downwards). In vitro digestibility of NDF (dNDF) has neutral values on both axes. For loading values, see Appendix: Table S4. (b) Score plot from the same PCA showing the placement of the 12 plant species within this nutritional space. Six of the plant species are evergreen: Pinus sylvestris, Picea abies, Juniperus communis, Vaccinium vitis‐idaea, Calluna vulgaris, and V. myrtillus (even though the latter is deciduous). Salix caprea is denoted by a large black point, as its nutritional composition has been found to correspond to the wintertime nutritional target balance of moose, as identified experimentally with captive moose (Felton et al., 2016). A moose that has access to all plants has a larger nutritional space (blue field) to navigate within compared with a moose that only has access to a few of the plants. The 12 food items together represent ca 85% of total ingested dry matter by these moose populations (Felton, Holmström, et al., 2020)