Many factors govern the abundance and distribution of wild populations, and proper management requires an understanding of these characteristics at multiple scales. Studying drivers of abundance for highly mobile, widely distributed species can be logistically challenging when they use a variety of habitats spread over large areas. Black-tailed deer (Odocoileus hemionus columbianus) are found in a wide range of habitats in northern California. Their abundance at the local scale has been shown to respond to annual precipitation, hardwood cover, habitat diversity, and human population density, among others. To investigate landscape-level drivers of abundance, we combined noninvasive fecal DNA surveys with spatially explicit capture recapture (SCR) modeling to explore variation in deer abundance across 59 transects in north-coastal California during the summers of 2019 and 2020. Of the 14 environmental factors explored, elevation was the strongest predictor of abundance. These findings were used to model variation in density across the region and, in the future, will facilitate investigation of how patterns of abundance relate to gene flow within deer populations and resource use by predators.