Bangley et al. Cownose Ray Migrations in Chesapeake Bay and Cape Canaveral

Data set 1: Counts of acoustically-tagged Cownose Rays and recorded environmental data within data buoy regions in the Chesapeake Bay. Data set 2: Counts of acoustically-tagged Cownose Rays and recorded environmental data within data buoy regions in the vicinity of Cape Canaveral. Data Description: These data include counts of individual mature Cownose Rays detected within data buoy regions in the Chesapeake Bay, presented as all rays combined, males only, and females only, presence records for each ray group, and environmental data (sea surface temperature in °C, day of year, and photoperiod in hours of daylight) recorded on data buoys on the date of detection within the region the rays were detected within. These data were used in boosted regression tree models to identify relationships between ray presence/abundance (the response variable) and the three environmental variables (the explanatory variables). Boosted regression tree analysis was conducted using the gbm.auto function in the R package “gbm.auto” (Dedman et al. 2017).