Greater white-fronted goose Anser albifrons habitat use in Louisiana in winter, 2016-2019

Greater White-fronted Geese Anser albifrons breed in Arctic habitats in North America and winter in the California Central Valley, Mexico and southern United States. Louisiana historically provided winter habitat to a large portion of the Greater White-fronted Goose population in North America. We used global positioning system (GPS) neck collars to monitor 78 Greater White-fronted Geese in Louisiana each winter from 2016–2019. Tracking devices were set to record GPS locations every 30 minutes, but fix intervals were occasionally lengthened due to reduced battery voltage. Nominal accuracy of GPS locations was 6 m. We defined a habitat unit as a polygonal feature that had distinct boundaries (e.g., roads, levees, fence rows, tree lines, etc.) with consistent land use. Habitat units were often crop fields but were occasionally wetlands. We visited all used habitat units to record land cover, vegetation height, and water depth to examine winter habitat use. We digitized each used habitat unit and assigned it to one of four regions in Louisiana, which largely reflected broad land use trends: central, coastal, north, and southwest. We also categorized each location by diel period (night, dawn, day, dusk) and hunting season (during or not during). Records in the dataset represent the number of Greater White-fronted Goose locations in each habitat unit according to each recorded covariate. Thus, each habitat unit may appear multiple times in the dataset because Greater-White-fronted Geese used that habitat unit at different times of the day or year.