Supplementary File Southeastern Naturalist

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S1. Details regarding location data preparation and land cover classification.

S2. Estimates of annual home range size of Florida Black Bears from the Camp Blanding study site, Ocala National Forest, Osceola National Forest, and Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge.

S3. Fragmentation metrics for the Camp Blanding study site, and Ocala and Osceola National Forests.

We removed all but the highest quality fixes obtained with 4 or more satellites (3D validated) from the GPS location data to ensure that we used only accurate bear locations. We manually removed a small number of 3D-validated locations from 2 collars that were clearly incorrect based on geography (i.e., those in the Atlantic Ocean) and biologically unreasonable distances between successive locations (i.e., more than 60 km from both the previous and the subsequent location within 30 minutes).

We also removed duplicate fixes that occurred in rapid succession (within minutes) after false mortality signals. The collars were programmed to collect bursts of locations to force an out-of-schedule submission of data. We rounded the time of each remaining location to the nearest hour but used only bihourly locations for the analysis because half-hour fixes were obtained only during dawn and dusk.

Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission personnel performed a test to determine the location error for the GPS collars. The collars were found to be accurate to a 20.3-m radius for 95% of the locations. Collars continued to transmit after dropping off of the Black Bear, creating a cluster of locations that made the last true bear location difficult to discern. To exclude bias by analyzing locations from a dropped collar and ensure that all data represented true bear locations, we used ArcMap to create a 20.3 m buffer around the last location of all Black Bear collars that had final locations in a tight cluster. Then we removed each sequentially preceding location inside the buffer until more than 5% of the locations in the final cluster were outside the buffer. The first location during that time period inside the buffer and those inside the buffer from a previous time period remained in the data set.

We used the raster format of the Florida Vegetation and Land Cover 2014 GIS layer for land cover classification (Redner and Srinivasan 2014). The layer covered the entire state at a resolution of 10 m. We used ArcMap (version 10.3; ESRI 2015) to clip the statewide layer to our study area, the 99% MCP of all Black Bear locations. The resulting layer contained 51 land cover categories, which we then grouped into six land cover categories based on similarity of landscape and vegetation and combining minimally available categories using the R package raster (Hijmans 2015). The remaining six land cover categories are:

• Forested wetlands: freshwater forested wetlands, cypress, isolated freshwater swamp,

floodplain swamp, other coniferous wetlands, wet flatwoods, baygall, cultural-palustrine,

dome swamp, basin swamp.

• Marsh/wetland: coastal uplands, freshwater non-forested wetlands, prairies and bogs,

marshes, isolated freshwater marsh, non-vegetated wetland, lacustrine, natural lakes and

ponds, cultural lacustrine, riverine, natural rivers and streams, cultural riverine.

• Rural/agricultural: barren and outcrop communities, rural, cropland/pasture,

orchards/groves, vineyards and nurseries, other agriculture, improved pasture.

• Tree plantations: not combined with any other category

• Urban: cultural and terrestrial, low-intensity urban, high-intensity urban, transportation,

communication, extractive, bare soil, clearcut.

• Woods/scrub: upland hardwood forest, mesic hammock, xeric hammock, high pine and

scrub, scrub, sand pine scrub, sandhill, pine flatwoods and dry prairie, dry flatwoods, dry prairie, palmetto prairie, mixed hardwood–coniferous, shrub and brushland, utilities.

Supporting Information S2

Table S2a. Overall and annual average home range sizes for Florida Black Bears estimated using the 95% Kernel Density Estimates (KDE) in the Camp Blanding study site and nearby locations. The number of bears included in the estimate are represented by n. A dash (-) indicates missing information.

We quantified the degree of habitat fragmentation within our study site in Florida at the Camp Blanding Joint Training Center and the surrounding public and private lands. We delineated our study site (hereafter, Camp Blanding area) using the 99% minimum convex polygon estimated from the GPS locations of all the Black Bears in our study. We also quantified fragmentation within the outer boundaries of nearby Ocala National Forest and nearby Osceola National Forest for comparison with our site because each supports a major population of Florida Black Bears. We grouped the land cover types in each area into 2 categories: suitable Black Bear habitat (marsh/wetland, wood/scrub, tree plantations, and forested wetlands) and unsuitable Black Bear habitat (rural/agricultural and urban). We defined open water as background to exclude those areas from analysis. We then calculated contagion, percent land cover, and patch density for each of the 3 areas, following Hostetler et al. (2009). We performed these calculations in the program Fragstats (version 4.2.1; McGarigal et al. 2015).

Out of 2,280 suitable habitat patches within the 99% MCP of all Black Bear home ranges in the Camp Blanding area, 81% were ≤ 0.01 km², whereas only 52% of suitable patches in Ocala were ≤0.01 km² (N = 792) and 43% of suitable patches in Osceola were ≤0.01 km² (N = 92). The Camp Blanding area exhibited a lower proportion of suitable habitat, with a more strongly dispersed, less strongly aggregated, patchy distribution, and smaller average patch sizes than in Ocala National Forest or Osceola National Forest (Table S3a). This indicates that the Camp Blanding area is more fragmented than the other 2 areas.

LITERATURE CITED
ESRI. 2015. ArcGIS Desktop. Version 10.3. Environmental System Research Institute,

Redlands, California.

Hijmans, R. J. 2015. Raster: Geographic Data Analysis and Modeling. R package version 2.4-

2.0. .

Hostetler, J.A., J. Walter McCown, E.P. Garrison, A.M. Neils, M.A. Barrett, M.E.

Sunquist, S.L. Simek, and M.K. Oli. 2009. Demographic consequences of anthropogenic influences: Florida Black Bears in north-central Florida. Biological Conservation 142:2456–2463.

McGarigal, K., S.A. Cushman, and E. Ene. 2015. Fragstats 4.2.1: Spatial pattern analysis

program for categorical and continous maps. University of Massachusetts, Amherst,

MA.

Redner, J., and S. Srinivasan. 2014. Florida Vegetation and Land Cover 2014. Final Report. Fish

Table S3a. Quantification of habitat fragmentation in our study site at Camp Blanding and the surrounding areas (delineated by the 99% minimum convex polygon from all bear locations in our study), compared to that at Ocala National Forest and Osceola National Forest. Contagion (CONTAG) was calculated for the entire landscape and represents the aggregation and interspersion of habitat in each area. The remaining Fragstats values describe only suitable Black Bear habitat. Percent land cover (PLAND) is the sum of the suitable habitat area divided by the total landscape area. Patch density (PD) is the number of suitable habitat patches divided by the landscape area (a higher value indicates more patchiness). The mean patch area (AREA_MN) is the sum of the suitable habitat area divided by the number of all patches. All metrics were calculated in Fragstats.