Habitat suitability and protected area coverage for an expanding cougar population in Canada.

Successful conservation of expanding large carnivore populations and management of human-wildlife conflict to promote coexistence requires sufficient spatiotemporal knowledge to inform appropriate action. In Canada, cougars () are expanding their range eastwards and little research is available for use in decision making by land managers and conservation planners. To inform proactive management regarding expanding populations of cougars in Canada, we utilized open-source cougar presence and land-cover data in a maximum entropy habitat suitability model to determine potentially suitable habitat for cougars across the country.