Spatial behavior and diet data for discrete-choice analyses: data observed and classified from GPS video camera collars worn by female members of the Fortymile Caribou Herd across Alaska, USA, and Yukon, Canada

In the springs of 2018 and 2019, 30 adult female caribou were captured and fitted with a GPS-Iridium collar integrated with a camera (VERTEX Plus Iridium V 3.0, Vectronic Aerospace GmbH, Germany; see Ehlers et al., 2021). All animal captures were conducted by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADFG) and approved in accordance with ADFG animal welfare standards (IACUC Permit numbers through ADFG: 0002-2018 and 0002-2019). Video collars recorded a 9-second video every 20 minutes during daylight hours (14 – 18 hours/day) from 10 May – 10 September 2018 and 2019. The internal GPS recorded spatial locations immediately following each 9-second video recording (see Ehlers et al. 2021). We used video collars to analyze the behavior and food choices of caribou during summer. We processed data from video collars using a two-phased approach that included both community science volunteers and botanists (see Ehlers et al. 2021 for details). In 18,134 processed videos, caribou behavior was classified into six categories for our spatial analysis of behavior: eating, ruminating, traveling, stationary awake, napping, or other (e.g., drinking, licking soil for minerals, and wading; Ehlers et al., 2021). We removed 44 classified videos that were missing spatial locations due to GPS error, leaving a final sample size of 18,090 behavior-classified videos for our spatial behavior and diet analyses.