The duration of maternal care, an important life history trait affecting population dynamics, varies greatly within species. Yet, our understanding of its predictors is limited, mostly correlative, and subject to misinterpretations, due to difficulties to disentangle the role of maternal- and offspring-related characteristics.

We conducted path analysis on a dataset including 217 brown bear litters captured over a 29-year period in two populations in Sweden (“North” and “South”) facing contrasting environmental conditions to identify and quantify the causes of variation in the duration of maternal care (1.5 years or 5 years).

The data presented in this dataset were collected as part of the Scandinavian Brown Bear Research Project, in two study populations of brown bears in Sweden: the North and the South. It includes data on the duration of maternal care as well as its potential determinants (maternal age, maternal mass, maternal parity status, litter size, offspring mass, litter sex ratio). This dataset is a cleaned version (e.g. exludes missing informations) that was used to conduct the analyses presented in the paper Van de Walle et al. 2020 Disentangling direct and indirect determinants of the duration of maternal care in brown bears: environmental context matters. 

There is only some missing information on maternal parity status (n=15).