This README.txt file was generated on 2022-03-23 by Natalie Posdaljian. GENERAL INFORMATION 1. Project Title: Changes in Sea Ice and Range Expansion of Sperm Whales in the Eclipse Sound Region of Baffin Bay, Canada a. Dataset Names 1. Dataset Name: Sperm Whale Presence with Sea Ice Data; Data File: SpermWhale_IceData_Combined.xlsx 2. Dataset Name: Synthesized Sighting Data; Data File: SightingData.xlsx 2. Author Information Corresponding Author Name: Natalie Posdaljian Institution: UC San Diego, Scripps Institution of Oceanography Email: nposdalj@ucsd.edu Co-Author 1 Name: Caroline Soderstjerna Institution: UC San Diego, Scripps Institution of Oceanography Email: csoderst@ucsd.edu Co-Author 2 Name: Joshua M. Jones Institution: UC San Diego, Scripps Institution of Oceanography Email: j8jones@ucsd.edu Co-Author 1 Name: Alba Solsona-Berga Institution: UC San Diego, Scripps Institution of Oceanography Email: asolsonaberga@ucsd.edu Co-Author 1 Name: John A. Hildebrand Institution: UC San Diego, Scripps Institution of Oceanography Email: jahildebrand@ucsd.edu Co-Author 1 Name: Kristin Westdal Institution: Oceans North Canada Email: kwestdal@oceansnorth.ca Co-Author 1 Name: Alex Ootoowak Institution: Oceans North Canada Email: piugatu@gmail.com Co-Author 1 Name: Simone Baumann-Pickering Institution: UC San Diego, Scripps Institution of Oceanography Email: sbaumann@ucsd.edu 3. Date of data collection 1. Sperm Whale Presence with Sea Ice Data: 7/1/2015 to 9/21/2019 2. Synthesized Sighting Data: 1924 to 2020 4. Geographic location of data collection 1. Sperm Whale Presence with Sea Ice Data: Guys Bight (72.65N, -75.56W) and Pond Inlet (72.72N, - 76.23W) 2. Synthesized Sighting Data: Davis Straight and Baffin Bay 5. Funding sources that supported the coolection of the data: Private foundation grand to UC San Diego, Oceans North Canada, World Wildlife Fund: Canada DATA & FILE OVERVIEW 1. Description of dataset These two data sets were used to establish historical sperm whale distribution in Baffin Bay from open-source, published data sets. We also investigated acoustic presence of sperm whales in Eclipse Sound, Canada and looked at the relationship of presence and sea ice concentration. 2. File List File 1 Name: SpermWhale_IceData_Combined.xlsx File 1 Description: Sperm whale acoustic detections and sea ice concentration from 2015-2019 File 2 Name: SightingData.xlsx File 2 Description: Synthesized open-source, published sperm whale sighting data from the Davis Strait and Baffin Bay METHODOLOGICAL INFORMATION Sighting data was compiled from eight published datasets and studies to gain a better understanding of the historical distribution of sperm whales in Baffin Bay. Sampling effort for the sighting data was only available for two of the eight data sets. First, for the Programme Intégré de recherches sur les oiseaux pélagiques (PIROP) data set (CWS 2021), effort was calculated by plotting the boundaries of where sperm whales were not sighted during their surveys between 1970-2000 (Gjerdrum et al. 2012). Second, data points for sperm whale sightings and survey effort area from Shell’s marine mammal visual monitoring and mitigation program from 2012-2014 were extracted and replicated from Frouin-Mouy et al. (2017) using WebPlotDigitizer (Rohatgi 2017). Although there was no sampling effort available for the remaining six data sets they were included in the analysis as opportunistic sightings. Commercial whaling records for sperm whales were accessed on the Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS) from the History of Marine Animal Populations (HMAP) Data Set 04: World Whaling (Smith 2021). Opportunistic and incidental sightings of sperm whales were also retrieved from the Maritimes Region Whale Sightings Database (WSDB) from Fisheries and Oceans Canada (Whalesightings Database 2021), the Incidental Sightings of Marine Mammals data set from the Institute of Marine Research (IMR) (Hartvedt 2020), and from environmental surveys done by the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NAFO 2014). Opportunistic sightings from citizen scientists were included from the Happywhale database (Happywhale 2021). One additional opportunistic sighting of a sperm whale in Eclipse Sound and tag data from sperm whales in Baffin Bay reported in Lefort et al. (2022) were also used. We used passive acoustic recordings from two sites in the eastern Canadian Arctic near Eclipse Sound between July 2015 and September 2019 over the span of five deployments (Fig. 1, Table 1). The temporal coverage among sites and between deployments varied as a result of field work timing to retrieve/deploy the instruments, the battery life and storage space of the instruments, and different duty cycle regimes discussed in further detail in the last Methods subsection. The two sites were approximately 23 km apart and have an approximate maximum detection range of 20 km for sperm whales based on previous studies (Tran et al. 2014). The Guys Bight (GB) instrument had one deployment at a depth of ~100 m in 2015. The depth of the instrument is not ideal for recording a deep-diving animal such as the sperm whale, but the recordings from 2015 were still included in the analysis as an opportunistic data set, in the sense that it was not necessarily acquired for this specific study. The instrument at Pond Inlet (PI) was at depths between 670 and 800 m over four deployment periods from 2016-2019 (Table 1). We used data from two types of autonomous, bottom-mounted recording devices to collect passive acoustic recordings: Song Meter SM2M (SM2M; Wildlife Acoustics Inc, Concord, MA, USA) and High-frequency Acoustic Recording Package (HARP; Wiggins and Hildebrand, 2007). The SM2M was deployed at the GB site and recorded at a sampling rate of 192 kHz. The HARPs were deployed at the PI site and collected recordings at a sampling rate of 200 kHz. These two sampling rates were chosen to detect the high-frequency echolocation clicks of marine mammals, including but not limited to, sperm whales. DATA-SPECIFIC INFORMATION FOR: SpermWhale_IceData_Combined.xlsx 1. Number of variables: 12 2 Number of cases/rows: 1054 3. Variable List: tbin 5-min Bin Count month Year day Percent Effort Ice Max Mean StDev Median Total 4. Missing data codes: No missing data 5. Abbreviations used: N/A 6. Other relevant information: N/A DATA-SPECIFIC INFORMATION FOR: SightingData.xlsx 1. Number of variables: 5 2 Number of cases/rows: 200 rows 3. Variable List: Year Latitude Longitude Source Effort 4. Missing data codes: No missing data 5. Abbreviations used: HMAP: History of Marine Animal Populations IMR: Institute of Marine Research CWS: Canadian Wildlife Service WSDB: Whale Sighting Database 6. Other relevant information: These data were compiled from open-source, published datasets and studies.