DOI: 10.5061/dryad.866t1g1t0
title: Data from: Coyote diet in North America: geographic and ecological patterns during range expansion

description: This dataset was used to review and analyze coyote diets across North
 America in "Coyote diets in North America: geographic and ecological
 patterns during range expansion" by Jensen et al. in Mammal Review.
 We only include data from studies that reported data as percent frequency
 of occurrence and from multiple seasons. We ultimately used 93 of the
 included studies (294 seasonal records) in our analyses.
description: <strong>Literature
 search</strong> In April 2020, we searched Web of Science,
 Google Scholar, and ProQuest for literature on coyote diets (Appendices S1
 and S2). We also searched Google Scholar and ProQuest in Spanish and
 French (this was not possible on Web of Science), because the coyote’s
 range extends into Central America and Canada and studies may have been
 published in those languages (Appendix S2). These searches resulted in ≥
 2066 potentially appropriate results (see Appendix S1 for why ‘≥’). We
 scanned titles and abstracts for evidence of quantified coyote diet
 results and downloaded 221 publications for further review. We also used a
 ‘snowball’ approach to identify additional articles missed during our
 above searches, wherein we reviewed the literature cited sections of the
 first 100 of the 221 screened studies (sorted alphabetically). We stopped
 at 100 because our rate of new article discovery had slowed dramatically
 by articles 80-100. This snowball search resulted in an additional 29
 studies. In total we downloaded 250 studies subject to additional
 screening through eight criteria designed to standardise our analyses
 (Appendix S3): Samples were scat and not intestinal tracts.
 Dietary data were assessed using morphometric
 methods and recorded as the percentage frequency of occurrence
 (%FO; the number of scat
 samples found to contain a given prey category divided by the total number
 of samples). Note that %FO can be &gt; 100% because each scat can
 contain more than one prey category. 
 Dietary data were reported by
 season (i.e., not just an annual average).
 Seasonal sample sizes were
 ≥20. 
 If sample sizes
 for each season were not reported, then the total sample size divided by
 number of seasons was ≥50. Samples were unique (i.e., we generally used the
 peer reviewed article if the same results were published in a thesis or
 dissertation). Authors reported all contents in samples (i.e.,
 we excluded studies that were not comprehensive in their description of
 diet and only focused on certain food categories).
 At least four of the six
 most-consumed food categories (ungulates, lagomorphs, small mammals,
 vegetation, birds, and invertebrates) were
 reported. 
 <strong>Data
 collection</strong> We retained 93 studies after implementing our
 criteria for inclusion, which contained 294 seasonal records. For each
 study, we recorded the location, the sample size for each season, and the
 median year it occurred. We recorded the latitude and longitude when
 provided, but often had to estimate the coordinates by visually selecting
 a centroid using figures provided by the authors or searching for the
 study site on Google Maps. Some studies reported data from multiple study
 sites, in which case we recorded information from each study site
 separately. We recorded which seasons were reported and, unless specified
 by the authors, classified spring as March – May, summer as June – August,
 autumn as September – November and winter as December – February. Some
 studies only reported a wet and dry season, which we entered as either
 summer or winter depending on which climate the study took place in (e.g.,
 southern México’s wet season is in summer, while California’s wet season
 is in winter). We recorded %FO of 12 food categories: 1) small
 mammals (e.g., small rodents); 2) lagomorphs; 3) wild ungulates (hereafter
 ‘ungulates’; 4) wild pigs <em>Sus scrofa</em>; 5)
 livestock (including poultry); 6) carnivora (including opossums
 <em>Didelphis virginiana</em>, domestic cats <em>Felis
 catus</em>, and domestic dogs); 7) birds; 8) reptiles and amphibians
 (hereafter, ‘reptiles’ because amphibians were very rarely reported); 9)
 invertebrates (e.g., Arthropoda); 10) vegetation (e.g..,
 fruit); 11)
 anthropogenic foods; and 12) other foods (e.g., beavers <em>Castor
 canadensis</em> and fish). For most prey categories we summed %FO
 values for different species within a single category. However, small prey
 item values are potentially artificially inflated when using %FO because
 multiple species can be in a single sample (Reynolds & Aebischer
 1991). Therefore, for
 small mammals, vegetation, and invertebrates we recorded the largest %FO
 value for a species in those categories (Doherty et al. 2018). For studies
 that reported grass or pine needles as the highest vegetation %FO
 (<em>n</em>=5), we chose the next highest %FO value to
 represent vegetation for that dataset because these items are sometimes
 inadvertently collected with scat samples. Each of the 12 food categories
 except wild pigs received a value for each season in a study (i.e., we
 entered a zero if the category was not reported; Lange et al. 2021). We
 chose this approach because we assumed that, unless we had reason to
 believe otherwise (and had excluded the study; see criteria seven and
 eight above), authors reported coyote diets comprehensively. For wild
 pigs, we only included studies that reported them (n = 48), given that
 their range was and is limited to the southern USA and parts of California
 (Bevins et al.
 2014), and so they did not
 co-occur with coyotes in most of the studies. Therefore, our summary
 statistics for wild pigs represent their consumption by coyotes where the
 two species co-occur.
description: There is a metadata sheet (README) which explains each column in
 the data.