Data and code for "Compound food failure on a deteriorated mast system drives Japan's bear-conflict crisis"

This repository contains the data and analysis code for the study "Compound food failure on a deteriorated mast system drives Japan's bear-conflict crisis," which examines how a structural break in the beech (Fagus crenata) flower-to-mast system, together with primary-productivity deficits, drives escalating Asiatic black bear (Ursus thibetanus japonicus) conflicts across five Tohoku prefectures, Japan. A single Python/Jupyter pipeline (Bear_Conflict_Analysis_Pipeline.ipynb) reproduces all analyses and main figures, drawing on three input datasets: beech flowering and mast indices (1990–2025), prefecture-level bear-incident counts (2004–2025), and MODIS GPP/PsnNet primary-productivity series (2000–2025). Beech indices are from the Tohoku Regional Forest Office (https://www.rinya.maff.go.jp/tohoku/sidou/buna.html), productivity data from publicly available MODIS products (https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/), and incident records from the Ministry of the Environment of Japan (https://www.env.go.jp/nature/choju/effort/effort12/effort12.html); an associated Figure1_Cite_material/folder documents the population-estimate citation pathway in Figure 1.