Data and code from: Spatially-explicit foraging by an apex predator linked to nearshore prey and their accessibility in lakes

Habitat coupling – where mobile predators forage over broad spatial scales and, in doing so, link food webs from semi-discrete habitat patches – has emerged as a major structuring force in lake ecosystems. For the cold-water apex predator lake trout (Salvelinus namaycush), food-web structure and morphometry-driven accessibility to nearshore areas in summer strongly determine the degree of littoral-pelagic habitat coupling across lakes. Much of the evidence for habitat coupling, however, is based on stable isotopes of carbon to estimate littoral energy acquisition, whereas spatial data directly linking fish movements and foraging behaviour in lakes, on which this theory is based – are limited. Here we estimated nearshore prey abundance at sites of different thermal accessibility and collected stomach content data, which we combined with three-dimensional acoustic telemetry positioning and acceleration data to directly measure the spatial location of summer foraging movements and habitat ..., These data include acoustic telemetry observations and diet relating to lake trout in two small boreal lakes at IISD-Experimental Lakes Area, temperature and dissolved oxygen readings for the same lakes, and the code used to process and analyse them. , , # Spatially-explicit foraging by an apex predator linked to nearshore prey and their accessibility in lakes

Dataset DOI: [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.g1jwstr0v](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.g1jwstr0v)

## Description of the data and file structure

This data set includes the temperature and telemetry data for Lakes 373 and 626 at IISD-Experimental Lakes Area used to analyse lake trout behaviour for the summers of 2021 and 2022. Data are owned by IISD-ELA except for the NRC sunrise and sunset data, which are downloaded from the NRC website. Code was written by Tazi Rodrigues and all authors collected the diet data.

### Files and variables

#### File: RBR\_YSI\_TempDO\_L373\_L626\_2021-2022.csv

**Description:** Temperature and dissolved oxygen measurements for the study lakes in the study years.

##### Variables

* TimeStamp: time of measurement
* Lake: location of measurement
* Average Depth (m): depth in metres of measurement
* Average Temperature (C): average temperature reading ...,