1. Restricting movements to familiar areas should increase individual fitness as it provides animals with information about the spatial distribution of resources and predation risk. While the benefits of familiarity for locating resources have been reported previously, the potential value of familiarity for predation avoidance has been accorded less attention. It has been suggested that familiarity should be beneficial for anti-predator behaviour when direct cues of predation risk are unclear and do not allow prey to identify well defined spatial refuges. However, to our knowledge, this hypothesis has yet to be tested.

2. Here, we assessed how site familiarity, measured as the intensity of use of a given location, is associated with the probability of roe deer (Capreolus capreolus) being killed by two predators with contrasting hunting tactics, the Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx) and human hunters. While risk of human hunting was confined to open habitats, risk of lynx predation was more diffuse, with no clear refuge areas.

3. We estimated cause-specific mortality rates in a competing risk framework for 212 GPS-collared roe deer in two ecologically distinct areas of Central Europe to test the hypothesis that the daily risk of being killed by lynx or hunters should be lower in areas of high familiarity.

4. We found strong evidence that site familiarity reduces the risk of being predated by lynx, whereas the evidence that the risk of being hunted is linked to site familiarity was weak.

5. We suggest that local knowledge about small scale differences in predation risk and information about efficient escape routes affect an individual’s ability to avoid or escape an attack by an ambush predator. Our study emphasises the role of site familiarity in determining the susceptibility of prey to predation. Further research will be required to better understand how a cognitive map of individual spatial information is beneficial for avoiding predation in the arms race that drives the predator-prey shell game.

The roe deer location data were collected from radio-collared animals in the two study sites Bernese (Switzerland) and Bavaria (Germany). Kill locations were collected through systematic searches of GPS clusters of radio-collared lynx. The data was processed as described in detail in the method section of the article.

The datasets provided can be used to repeat the analyses described in the article. We provide the processed raw dataset, meaning that for some fields of the competing risk datset some rows (i.e. coverhunt and coverhunttime - see ReadMe file) contain missing values which were omitted in the analysis.

Raw data are also available through the EURODEER platform. Anyone is welcome to join the EURODEER project and obtain an access to the database after contacting the persons in charge (see https://eurodeer.org/contacts/).