Vegetation and goose nest data from Southampton Island, Nunavut

Ground cover within 1 m radius from the centre of goose nest bowls was visually estimated for into bins (trace, 1–5%, 5–25%, 25–50%, 50–75%, 75–95%, >95%) for each ground cover categories. Transects at East Bay were perpendicular to the south shore, using terrestrial vegetation at the high tide line as “metre 0”. At South Bay transects extended in a cardinal direction from a randomly chosen prominent local feature such as a pond or river, into the surrounding vegetation. All transects were 1km in length traversing except TRCH2 was 500 m. Cover in a 10cm x 10cm area at each 1 m point along each transect was assessed visually. For points in which several cover categories co-occurred, all were separately noted; points with no vegetation were classified as appropriate into non-vegetation categories. A square quadrat (50 cm x 50 cm) divided into 10 cm x 10 cm cells was also used to quantify the occurrence of each plant species or cover class every 50 m along each transect; for the 500 m transect, quadrats were placed every 25 m. Quadrats occurring in ponds and streams were discarded since they added no information about vegetation composition. For the remaining quadrats, the occurrence of all identifiable species and non-vegetation cover classes present in each 10 cm cell was recorded, and the number of cells in which each occurred was tallied to yield the overall frequency of occurrence in that quadrat.