Fig 1.
Seal River and Churchill River Estuary region with detailed depth classes.
Data for depth classes republished from Natural Resources Canada CHS Chart 5400 under a CC BY license, with permission from Natural Resources Canada, original copyright 2003.
Fig 2.
Western Hudson Bay 2015 beluga survey location detailing survey area, survey track lines and full photographic survey coverage.
Table 1.
Beluga whale age classification.
Fig 3.
Western Hudson Bay 2015 survey photograph containing over 2,000 individual beluga whales.
Table 2.
Total beluga whales identified, proportion of total and density per km2 in 2015 Western Hudson Bay survey (not including the Nelson River Estuary) by location and age class.
Fig 4.
Beluga locations identified from 2015 aerial survey in southwest Hudson Bay overlaid on the estimated plume extent for the month of August, 2015 (NASA, 2018).
[Approximate plume boundary defined using the 0.3 m-1 isopleth, which is the KD490 value that corresponds with the gradient between turbid and clear water, as shown on the map. The black blocks represent no-data areas in KD490 dataset.].
Table 3.
Belugas by estuary and age class compared to environmental variables: Median distance (25% and 75% quantile) to intertidal zone, distance to coast, distance to river plume, distance to river and sea surface temperature.
Table 4.
Kruskal-Wallis test comparing differences between environmental co-variates and age class (adult, juvenile, calf) of belugas near the Churchill and Seal River Estuaries.