Africa’s overlooked top predator: towards a better understanding of martial eagle feeding ecology in the Maasai Mara, Kenya

Raptors exert top-down influences on ecosystems via their effects on prey population dynamics and community composition. Most raptors are sympatric with other predators, thus complicating our understanding of their relative influence in these systems. Estimates of kill rates and prey biomass recycling have been used as predation metrics that allow quantitative comparison among species and assessment of the relative role of single species within complex food webs. Few studies have produced findings of kill rates or prey biomass recycling for raptors. We used a supervised machine learning algorithm to behaviourally classify high resolution accelerometer informed GPS locations of tagged adult non-breeding martial eagles Polemaetus bellicosus in the Maasai Mara region of Kenya to estimate kill rates and prey biomass recycling. Eagle locations classified as feeding were clustered using distance and time thresholds to identify kills and calculate kill rates. Identified kill sites were quickly..., , , # Africa’s overlooked top predator: Towards a better understanding of martial eagle feeding ecology in the Maasai Mara, Kenya

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.v15dv423j](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.v15dv423j)

This dataset contains raw data that were collected and used for the manuscript entitled \"Africa’s overlooked top predator: Towards a better understanding of martial eagle feeding ecology in the Maasai Mara, Kenya\".

## Description of the data and file structure

There are 5 CSV files in this dataset.

martialeagleweights.csv - The file contains the weight of each martial eagle used in this study to estimate sex-specific martial eagle weights.

reportedkills.csv - The file contains each kill that was reported to us with the correct time and location requirements.

groundtruthedkills.csv - This file contains the information on each of the algorithm identified kills that our team ground-truthed in the field.

NBdates.csv - This files contains the start and end dates for the non-bree...