1km resolution rasters of grizzly bear skull length (mm)

Maps of grizzly bear skull size developed based on the data in the British Columbia's Compulsory Inspection database (url: catalogue.data.gov.bc.ca/dataset/45711667-7878-4d86-8b5e-d0be5997dd16). NAD83/BC Albers projectiong (EPSG: 3005). 1km resolution. We considered the skull length (in millimetres) of all male bears in the database over the age of seven (n = 3451) and female bears above the age of 5 (n = 5871), ages by which they are thought to have reached their full size (Mowat and Heard 2006, doi.org/10.1139/z06-016).

Using these data, we generated predicted maps of male and female skull size for the province by interpolating measured skull length using a simple kriging process based on a Gaussian variogram model with the R package gstat (Pebesma 2004, doi.org/10.1016/j.cageo.2004.03.012), generating a raster with 1km resolution.