Accounting for viewshed area and animal availability when estimating density and recruitment of unmarked white-tailed deer

# Accounting for viewshed area and animal availability when estimating density and recruitment of unmarked white-tailed deer Our dataset is comprised of timelapse and motion-detection photo data collected from two study sites across two sampling seasons (June-December of 2021 and 2022). Our dataset is divided into four R Data Serialization (RDS) files. Files are named by site (JC for James Collins Wildlife Management Area or SB for Sans Bois Wildlife Management Area) and year collected. ## Description of the data and file structure We designed our study to comply with the assumptions of the Space-to-Event (STE) unmarked abundance model. Each row corresponds to a single image. Columns necessary to run STE include "cam", "count", "area", and "datetime". The column corresponding to the taxa of interest should be renamed to "count". File structure is identical for the four RDS files. * datetime: Date and time of when the image was taken. * comments: Location for any necessary comments regarding an image. - opstate: Operating state of the camera (e.g., malfunctioning, burned, tilted...etc.). - cam: Camera ID. - area: Viewshed area per camera in square meters. - otherwhat: Categorical data consisting of a species common name. Corresponds to count data in the same row under the "other" column. - humanwhat: Categorical data consisting of types of humans (e.g., researcher, hunter, hiker...etc.). Corresponds to count data in the same row under the "human" column. **The following columns are comprised of count data (0-n) representing the number of individuals of a species detected per image.** * deer, human, turkey, armadillo, raccoon, coyote, feralhog, squirrel, opossum * other: Count data representing the number of individuals of a later specified species detected per image. Specified by "otherwhat" column. **The following columns are comprised of count data (0-n) representing the number of individuals of a sex or stage class detected per image.** * WTDantlerless: Adult female white-tailed deer. * WTDantlered: Adult male white-tailed deer. * WTDfawn: Juvenile white-tailed deer. * WTDunkn: Deer detections where sex or stage was not able to be determined. * Turkeyfemale, turkeymale, turkeypoult, turkeyunkn ## Code/Software We used the package 'spaceNtime' to estimate abundance of white-tailed deer using the STE model. We used the package 'SunCalc' to gather data on daily sunrise and sunset times within our sampling frame to constrain sampling efforts to crepuscular periods.