The Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources samples black bear (Ursus americanus) DNA at baited barbed wire hair corrals on multiple independent study areas in Ontario, Canada, annually since 2017 (except in 2020 and 2021). Spatially explicit capture-recapture data from surveys conducted since 2017 are archived here. This data set will be cited in manuscripts presenting analyses of the entire data set or subsets thereof.

The Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources sampled black bear DNA at baited barbed wire hair corrals on multiple independent study areas in Ontario, Canada, annually since 2017. Wire height (~50 cm) was intended to exclude dependent offspring (bears aged 0 and 1 years) from the sample. Sampling took place over 5 weekly sampling occasions in spring and early summer (except that sampling on ShirleyLakeRd in 2019 was extended by two weeks for a total of 7 occasions). Individuals and their sex were identified from microsatellite genotypes to 15 loci to generate encounter histories.

"StudyAreas.csv" lists the study area-specific files with trap locations ("traps_...csv") and bear encounter histories ("caps_...txt") and summarizes data collection results.
Also provided in this file are the year of sampling, the forest region sampled (boreal or Great Lakes St. Lawrence ["GLSL"; Rowe 1972]), and the Wildlife Landscape Zone (WLZ) i.e. management zone sampled.

"traps...csv" files provide numeric labels (detectorID) and x- and y-coordinates of barbed wire hair corrals on each study area. 
Coordinate units are UTMs (datum = NAD83; longitude zone included in the filename at end after "Z")
Wherever temporal sampling effort varied among sampling occasions, week-specific sampling effort in days is provided as additional columns in traps files. 
These additional colums are usually recognized by the 'secr' R package and included as 'usage' information when traps and capthist objects are created. 

"caps....txt" files are individual-specific encounter histories. Columns are (1) "session", which references the study area (and year for study areas sampled in multiple years), 
(2) "indiv": an individual identifier for different bears, (3) "ocn" is the temporal sampling occasion, 
(4) "trap": is an identifier for a sampling location (coordinates in corresponding "traps...csv" file), and "sex" ("fem" or "mal").
Encounter histories exclude repeat detections of the same individual at the same trap within occasions 

All "caps" and "traps" files include the study area name and the year of sampling in the file name to ensure encounter histories can be matched to the appropriate traps.

Session names are unique across study area and year-specific data sets. Session names are study area names except for study areas sampled in more than one year. For those study areas, we appended the year of sampling to the study area name for all years other than the first year.
E.g. for the study area named "Sowden", the session name for 2017 data is "Sowden", and for data from subsequent years the session names are "Sowden2018", and "Sowden2019".

Example R script for importing study-area specific data and formatting them as a capthist object is provided ("RScript_InputBlackbearSECRdata.txt").