Walrus Haulout and In-water Activity Levels Relative to Sea Ice Availability in the Chukchi Sea: 2008-2014

An animal's energetic costs are dependent on the amount of time it allocates to various behavioral activities. For Arctic pinnipeds, the time allocated to active and resting behaviors could change with future reductions in sea ice cover and longer periods of open water. The Pacific walrus (Odobenus rosmarus divergens) is a large Arctic pinniped that rests on sea ice or land between foraging trips to feed on the seafloor. This dataset contains behavioral data collected from 216 radio-tagged adult female walruses instrumented in the Chukchi Sea (2008-2014) that formed the basis of a Bayesian generalized linear mixed effects model that investigated probability that a walrus was in water foraging, in water not foraging, or hauled out, as a function of environmental covariates. The data are structured such that each line represents an hour of behavior collected during every third hour of the UTC day (hours 0 through 21), which was associated with temperature and wind metrics derived from the North American Regional Reanalysis dataset, as well as an index of the daily availability of sea ice based on the daily National Ice Center's Marginal Ice Zone product and an index of the availability of land. Each record presents the walrus behavior recorded during the record's hour, the previous hour, and the subsequent hour.