Outputs of current speed and sea otter abundance models in Glacier Bay, Alaska ...

• Main Authors: Leach, Clinton, Lu, Xinyi, Drew, Gary
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: Dryad 2023
• Subjects: FOS Natural sciences; Enhydra lutris; Tidal circulation; Glacier Bay; Current speed; Population ecology; Bower; glacier; Tidewater; Alaska
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.vt4b8gtx6; https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.vt4b8gtx6

Sea otters are apex predators that can exert considerable influence over the nearshore communities they occupy. Since facing near extinction in the early 1900s, sea otters are making a remarkable recovery in Southeast Alaska, particularly in Glacier Bay, the largest protected tidewater glacier fjord in the world. The expansion of sea otters across Glacier Bay offers both a challenge to monitoring and stewardship and an unprecedented opportunity to study the top-down effect of a novel apex predator across a diverse and productive ecosystem. Our goal was to integrate monitoring data across trophic levels, space, and time to quantify and map the predator-prey interaction between sea otters and butter clams (Saxidomus gigantea), one of the dominant large bivalves in Glacier Bay and a favored prey of sea otters. To do so, we developed a modeling framework to account for both bottom-up and top-down drivers of butter clam abundance and dynamics. For the bottom-up driver, we used the root-mean-square current speed ... : The archive 'current.zip' contains the current speed raster and was produced by Drew et al. (2013) from the tidal circulation model developed therein. Drew, G. S., Piatt, J. F., & Hill, D. F. (2013). Effects of currents and tides on fine-scale use of marine bird habitats in a Southeast Alaska hotspot. Marine Ecology Progress Series, 487, 275–286. https://doi.org/10.3354/meps10304 The archive 'otters.zip' contains the output from the sea otter ecological diffusion model developed and fit in Lu et al. (2019). The manuscript and its supplement contain detailed information on the model structure and the Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm used to fit the model to sea otter aerial survey data and generate posterior samples of model parameters that can be used to generate a raster of the posterior mean sea otter abundance through time. Lu, X., Williams, P. J., Hooten, M. B., Powell, J. A., Womble, J. N., & Bower, M. R. (2019). Nonlinear reaction–diffusion process models improve inference for population ...