Black bear hunting activity and harvests - Open Ontario

Data Provider

The provincial government of Ontario provides open access to thousands of data sets via their Open Data Ontario portal. The purpose of sharing all data documents with the public is to remain transparent and accessible. More details about the data license, training materials, and other information can be found here.

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Black Bear Hunting Activity

The dataset records numbers of black bears harvested and active black bear license holders every year from 2012 to 2018 in different wildlife management unit (WMU). The WMUs are the administrative coverage area that serves as a land base for wildlife monitoring and management.

The original dataset of bears harvested and active hunters and its supporting document can be found here and you can quickly preview the CSV dataset file here. Moreover, The legend description can be viewed here.

Libraries

Python

import pandas as pd 
import seaborn as sb
import matplotlib as plt

R

library(latticeExtra)
library(tidyverse) 

Organizing Dataset

The following code is used to download the dataset.

Python

# Download the csv file AND change the data format of the year
data_download = pd.read_csv("https://files.ontario.ca/opendata/black_bear_2019.csv")

total = data_download[data_download.WMU == "Total"]
data = data_download[data_download.WMU != "Total"]

R

# Download the csv file AND change the data format of the year
data_download <- read_csv("https://files.ontario.ca/opendata/black_bear_2019.csv")

total <- data_download |> rename_all(make.names)|> filter(WMU =="Total")
data <- data_download |> rename_all(make.names)|> filter(WMU !="Total")

The data has columns WMU, year, number of active hunters, and the harvest. All numbers of bear harvested and active hunters are estimated based on the replies received from a sample of hunters, so it might contain a statistical error. In the WMU called Total, all of the WMUs are summed.

Python

total.head()

       WMU  Year  Active Hunters  Harvest
616  Total  2012           21218     5157
617  Total  2013           20891     4716
618  Total  2014           22875     5017
619  Total  2015           26293     6662
620  Total  2016           31480     8152

data.head()

   WMU  Year  Active Hunters  Harvest
0  01A  2012               1        0
1  01A  2013               6        0
2  01A  2014               6        2
3  01A  2015               8        2
4  01A  2016               0        0

R

head(total)

# A tibble: 6 × 4
  WMU    Year Active.Hunters Harvest
  <chr> <dbl>          <dbl>   <dbl>
1 Total  2012          21218    5157
2 Total  2013          20891    4716
3 Total  2014          22875    5017
4 Total  2015          26293    6662
5 Total  2016          31480    8152
6 Total  2017          28718    6497

head(data)

# A tibble: 6 × 4
  WMU    Year Active.Hunters Harvest
  <chr> <dbl>          <dbl>   <dbl>
1 01A    2012              1       0
2 01A    2013              6       0
3 01A    2014              6       2
4 01A    2015              8       2
5 01A    2016              0       0
6 01A    2017              6       0

Plotting the Number of Bear Hunters and Harvest

The following code plots the number of bears harvested per active hunter in each WMU.

Python

harvest_hunter_plot = sb.scatterplot(data = data,
                                     x = 'Active Hunters',
                                     y = 'Harvest', 
                                     hue = 'WMU', 
                                     legend = False)
harvest_hunter_plot.set_title("Hunters and Harvest in different WMUs");

R

ggplot(data, aes(x = Active.Hunters, y = Harvest, colour = WMU))+
  geom_point(show.legend = FALSE)+
  ggtitle("Hunters and Harvest in different WMUs")