View ECCC Data Mart (French) (French, HTML)

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Publisher-reported update

2022-01-14

This dataset contains the stable nitrogen (δ15N), carbon (δ13C), oxygen (δ18O), and hydrogen (δ2H) isotope data from 1123 samples of underfur hair of adult polar bears (Ursus maritimus) sampled between 1992 to 2017 from subpopulation boundaries (zone) in the Canadian Arctic and sub-Arctic. Wide-ranging apex predators are among the most challenging of all fauna to conserve and manage. This is especially true of the polar bear, an iconic predator that is hunted in Canada and threatened by global climate change. We used combinations of stable isotopes (13C,15N,2H,18O) in polar bear hair to test the ability of stable isotopic profiles to ‘assign’ bears to (1) predefined managed subpopulations, (2) subpopulations defined by similarities in stable isotope values using quadratic discriminant analysis, and (3) spatially explicit, isotopically distinct clusters derived from interpolated (i.e. ‘kriged’) isotopic landscapes, or ‘isoscapes’, using the partitioning around medoids algorithm. A four-isotope solution provided the highest overall assignment accuracies (~80%) to pre-existing management subpopulations with accuracy rates ranging from ~30–99% (median = 64%). Assignment accuracies of…

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