These data and code are associated with the publication in The Journal of Wildlife Management entitled “Northern Bobwhite breeding season and nest survival are greater on native grasslands.” We evaluated the influence of vegetation cover type, woody vegetation structure and composition, and habitat management on nest survival and adult survival from May through September in southwest Missouri 2014-2018.

Survival observations were collected using radio-telemetry methods; we tracked radio-transmittered adults and monitored nests attended by marked adults through the breeding season.

Vegetation and habitat management covariates surrounding locations of nest and adult survival observations were calculated from maps derived from field observations, management histories, LiDAR data, and aerial imagery.

We estimated survival using the logistic exposure method.

Complete data and code are available here.

Description of the data and file structure

BirdS: Adult survival observations: [1] alive, [0] mortality

nestsurv: Nest monitoring observations: [1] alive, [0] failed

area[1]: Study site. Shawnee Trail
area[2]: Study site. Shelton Memorial Prairie
area[3]: Study site. Stony Point Prairie
area[4]: Study site. Talbot Conservation Area
area[5]: Study site. Wah’Kon-Tah Prairie

birdid: unique bird id described by site-legband-wingtagsex: female = 1, male = 2
date: mm/dd/yyinterval: number of days since previous survival observationjulian: day of year

ag: percent agricultural crop cover within 100-m radiusagid: percent idle agricultural crop cover within 100-m radiuscg: percent cool season grass (tall fescue) cover within 100-m radiusmg: percent mixed cool season-warm season grass cover within 100-m radiusng: percent native grassland cover within 100-m radiusnggr: percent native grassland cover within 100-m radiusngid: percent native grassland cover within 100-m radiusngpb: percent native grassland cover within 100-m radiusngrpb: percent native grassland cover within 100-m radius
shrub: percent shrub cover within 100-m radiustree: percent tree cover within 100-m radiusswq_d2tree: distance to nearest tree from nest/adult locationswq_d2shrub: distance to nearest shrub from nest/adult location

Sharing/Access information

Please contact Missouri Department of Conservation Science Branch to request location (UTM) tabular data and spatial covariate data of vegetation composition and structure.

Code/Software

Bayesian analyses were conducted in R using program JAGS.
Performance of candidate models were compared using the loo package.
Predictions of survival responses across gradients of environmental conditions were derived in R using tidyverse and reshape2 packages.

Required packages:
tidyverse. Data processing and management
reshape2. Data processing
jagsUI. Bayesian analyses
car. Evaluating multicollinearity among independent variables
loo. Model selection based on LOOIC

Full code are available https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8284387.