Long-term abundance time-series of the High Arctic terrestrial vertebrate community of Bylot Island, Nunavut

Arctic ecosystems present unique opportunities for community-wide monitoring, in part due to their relatively low species richness. However, conducting research in these remote environments poses significant logistical challenges, resulting in long-term monitoring being exceedingly rare. Here, we focus on the long-term, intensive ecological monitoring efforts conducted on the south plain of Bylot Island (~400 km2, Nunavut, Canada), which has generated a remarkable dataset spanning up to 30 years, a rarity in tundra ecosystems. Our goals are to i) provide long-term time series of annual species densities for the broadest possible range of species and years, measured across various spatial scales, to assess of interannual variability and trends in species density; and ii) upscale vertebrate abundance, annually when feasible, or otherwise as long-term averages, to the landscape scale (~400 km2) to allow food web modelling. We have standardized data obtained with different field methods to ..., Complete documentation describing the project’s context and objectives, the study site, the data collection process, the methods used to estimate species abundance, the resulting data set files with the associated metadata can be found in MetadataS1.pdf at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13993828., , # Long-term abundance time-series of the High Arctic terrestrial vertebrate community of Bylot Island, Nunavut

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### **Access data, metadata and code**

#### Data - `Data_S1/`: [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.44j0zpcnt](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.44j0zpcnt)

#### Methods and metadata - `MetadataS1.pdf`: [https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13993828](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13993828)

#### Code and R project - `BYLOT_species_abundance_dataset.zip`: [https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13993827](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13993827)

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#### Objectives

With over a decade of additional community-wide monitoring compared to earlier studies, our goals are to i) provide long-term time series of annual vertebrate density measured at various spatial scales and for the broadest possible range of species and years, to allow the assessment of interannual variability and trends in species density; and ii) upscale annual vertebrate abundance or sometimes long-term averages to the landscape ...,