Western Arctic Herd Caribou: Winter Home-Range and Within-Home-Range Resource Selection Datasets

This use–availability dataset contains environmental attributes extracted to GPS locations of Western Arctic Herd caribou and to randomly generated “available” habitat points. Data were generated at two spatial scales to support analyses of (1) home‐range selection and (2) within‐range habitat selection.

For the home‐range selection scale, available points were generated across the full extent of the Western Arctic Herd’s winter range for each individual caribou-year. For the within‐range selection scale, available points were generated within a 3-km buffer surrounding each used GPS location to represent the local habitat accessible to the animal. See Salganek et al. 2025 for a full description of methods, spatial filtering, random point generation, and environmental data sources.

To protect sensitive information, the actual XY coordinates of caribou locations have been redacted. All environmental attributes remain intact, and locations are spatially consistent within anonymized grid cells, allowing for reproducible analysis without revealing precise positions of individual animals.

Each used and available point includes the following environmental variables:

Snow properties
SnowDepthcm — Snow depth (cm)
SnowDensitykgm3 — Snow density (kg/m³)
CumulativeWindCrustSeverity — Severity index of wind-driven crust events
CumulativeMeltFreezeCrustSeverity — Severity index of melt–freeze crust events
CumulativeROSCrustSeverity — Severity index of rain-on-snow crust events
CumulativeIceCrustSeverity — Severity index of basal or near-surface ice crusts

Vegetation fractional cover (top-of-canopy percent cover)
allDecShrub — Deciduous shrubs (%)
allEvShrub — Evergreen shrubs (%)
allForb — Forbs (%)
bTree — Broadleaf trees (%)
cTree — Coniferous trees (%)
graminoid — Graminoids (%)
talShr — Tall shrubs (>2 m; %)
tmLichenLight2 — Terricolous lichens (%)