Newly‐Digitized Long‐Term Dataset of Brown Bear Distribution in Hokkaido, Japan (1978–2017), Covering a Period of Management Policy Transformation

ABSTRACT

Understanding long‐term changes in species distribution is essential for wildlife conservation and management, particularly for large carnivores that interact with human activities. Brown bears ( Ursus arctos ) in Hokkaido, Japan, experienced a substantial population decline during an intensive culling program known as the Spring Bear‐Culling Program, which operated from 1966 to 1990. However, despite the availability of distribution data from multiple nationwide surveys conducted between 1978 and 2017, spatial data from the periods of population contraction remain largely inaccessible. This paper presents a newly digitized dataset of brown bear distribution in Hokkaido for 1984, 1991, and 1997 based on historical survey reports conducted by the Hokkaido Government. Original printed maps derived from questionnaire surveys, interviews, and hunting records were manually digitized into ESRI shapefile format using a standardized 5‐km grid system. Publicly available datasets from the 1978 and 2017 national surveys were integrated to establish a consistent temporal framework comprising five survey years spanning approximately 40 years. The resulting dataset shows that the number of grid cells classified as “presence” was the lowest in the 1991 survey (1415 cells) and the highest in the 2017 survey (2872 cells). This dataset is one of the few available datasets documenting the spatiotemporal dynamics of brown bear distribution in Hokkaido from the late 20th century to recent years. It enables analyses of the long‐term relationships between harvest pressure, land‐use change, and bear distribution at broad spatial extents and fine spatial resolution. The Metadata for this abstract is available in MetaCat in JaLTER at https://doi.org/10.20783/DIAS.JLE.101 , and the complete dataset is available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.32194716 .