Can social instability in wolf populations lead to reduced deer refugia habitats?

Many studies have researched the effects of wolf distribution on local deer populations.

Even in areas that are occupied by wolf packs in a rather contiguous manner (territories are adjacent or slightly overlapping), deer would find refugia (‘safer habitats’) near the territorial boundaries of the wolf packs (the so-called bufferzones where neighbouring packs tend to spend a lower amount of time and hunt less often due to the conflict risk with neighbours).

If lethal management of wolves can result in a greater pack turnover, this can lead to less stable and predictable territorial boundaries between packs, smaller pack sizes, territorial overlap between packs and reduced bufferzones.

If this is true, deer might find it more difficult to utilize the relative safety of the bufferzones for foraging or reproductive purposes because the bufferzones become smaller in size or they no longer exist or because they are in a constant state of readjustments and the deer might not be able to track the current distribution of bufferzones instead only tracking the current distribution of wolves.

Summer is a more predictable time with a greater likelihood of bufferzone maintenance as the packs centralize around dens that are more frequently central to the range, as well (at least, further from the active dens of the neighbours).

However, wolf denning begins very shortly before fawning/calving and it is not clear if deer have the time to apprehend the distribution of the active wolf dens and strategize their birthing accordingly.

This is especially aggravated if the pack turnover is great and traditional den sites are used less often.

Predictability of wolf distribution might be an important factor contributing to deer cognition with respect of safe habitat use.

It would be important to study the effects of social instability in wolf populations on bufferzone use by the deer and deer movements under conditions of more traditional (predictable) and permanent wolf pack distribution vs. a flux state in wolf distribution.