2.1 Study Area
We found two sites in Ontario with collections of multi-year historic muskrat survey data from coastal wetlands: Point Pelee National Park and Matchedash Bay–Gray Marsh (Fig. 2). In both cases the historic data were more than 30 years old. The methods and data from these surveys are published in internal government reports and we were able to obtain copies from the respective offices responsible for the resource management of these sites. We replicated the historic muskrat surveys in the marshes of these two locations between 2014 and 2019. Both sites are considered Great Lakes coastal wetlands but are of different hydrogeomorphic types; the Point Pelee marsh is classified as a barrier-beach wetland while the Matchedash Bay complex is classified as a combination of protected embayment and drowned river mouth wetlands (Albert et al., 2005). These two sites are situated on different Great Lakes and are separated geographically by a straight-line distance of 385 km.