Sample of photographs
We amassed 693 photographs of which nearly 80% were community-sourced
and spanned years 1948 to 2018 from the entire distributional range of
mountain goats (Figure 1) with the exception of Nevada and the Northwest
Territories (NWT). Broken down by sources of data, professional
photographers were our main source of photographs (N=203) followed by
the CitSci platform (185), iNaturalist (126), researchers (Caw Ridge,
Alberta, and Glacier National Park (GNP), Montana: 58), members of the
public by e-mail to the lead author (15), members of professional
societies including B.C. Mountain Goat Society, Wilderness Society,
Summit Post (13), and other sources (4). Our 2018 southern Yukon sample
included 58 photographs from YWP and 31 from the three wild sites.
Mountain goats at GNP (where mountain goats are habituated in some
locations) were most photographed by the public and by one professional
photographer in particular (Sumio Harada), followed by Mt. Evans,
Colorado (where mountain goats are introduced and also habituated to
people) while Caw Ridge and Yukon were third and fourth with data
provided by researchers (including the authors and inclusive of camera
trap photos). Most but not all of these photographs (635 of the 693)
were included in the analysis (see Statistical Analysis and Results).
Finally, and even if photographs were submitted with elevation data, we
used provided geo-referenced locations of all photographs to source
elevation in meters for each photo from the Global Multi-resolution
Terrain Elevation Data 2010 (GMTED2010).