Flight trajectories and as-flown nadir coverage polygons from UAV thermal wildlife surveys at Mt. Sik, Sangju, Republic of Korea (January-February 2023)

Vector GIS data from two UAV thermal-infrared wildlife surveys in a winter, leaf-off mountainous forest at Mt. Sik (Sik-san), Seogok-dong, Sangju-si, Republic of Korea. 1. Survey settings Aircraft: DJI Matrice 300 RTK Payload: DJI Zenmuse H20T (thermal infrared and RGB) Altitude: 100 m above ground level, with terrain-adjusted waypoints Camera held at nadir during systematic coverage First Survey: 17-19 January 2023, route spacing 100 m, north-south lines Second Survey: 7-8 February 2023, route spacing 50 m, east-west lines 2. How the coverage layers were derived At 100 m above ground level the H20T thermal sensor images a strip of ground 56.89 m wide across the direction of flight. Each coverage layer is the dissolved 28.45 m buffer (half that strip width) around the corresponding recorded trajectory, and therefore represents the ground that passed beneath the nadir-pointing sensor rather than the planned survey lines. Buffers follow the whole recorded track, including arcs and the climb-out from the home point, so parts of each layer fall outside the analysis boundary. Intersecting a coverage layer with 'analysis_target_area_30ha' reproduces the figures reported in the associated article: 55.78% of the analysis area at 100 m route spacing and 99.36% at 50 m spacing. 3. Layers flight_route_100m, flight_route_50m: recorded flight trajectories as-flown_coverage_100m, as-flown_coverage_50m: reconstructed nadir coverage analysis_target_area_30ha: the boundary used as the denominator above study_watershed: wider study watershed boundary All layers are supplied as a single GeoPackage in EPSG:5186. Distances are in metres and areas are reported in hectares. 4. Not included Wildlife detection locations. Detection records are published without coordinates as Supplementary Table S1 of the associated article. The coordinates themselves are withheld because they identify sites used by leopard cat, which is protected nationally, and by wild boar, which is managed nationally for disease control; their release also requires institutional approval.