Data from: Evaluating the practical feasibility of indigenous plant-based snares to reconcile rare species conservation and subsistence hunting

Abstract This dataset comprises measurements of the tensile strength of plant-based snare ropes from southeastern Cameroon, along with outcomes from snare deployments, together with R code to reproduce data preprocessing, statistical estimation, and visualisation. The deposit includes four CSV files and R scripts. The tensile strength test dataset (Plant_rope_strength_test.csv) contains records for 85 plant ropes (1 m each), including rope diameter, maximum load, an indicator of failure versus censoring, the number of fibre joint points, and drying condition. The rope breakage-time dataset (Trap_days.csv) includes 119 breakage observations and can be used for interval-censored survival analyses using the accompanying R workflow. The 2023 comparative deployment dataset (Snare_data_2023.csv) covers 100 snares (50 plant-based and 50 metal) and includes deployment duration, structural measurements, and counts of animal pass events during the deployment period. The 2025 structure–performance dataset (Snare_data_2025.csv) covers 60 plant-based snares (20 each in size classes s/m/l) and includes structural measurements, tensile force at deployment, trigger counts, and days_elapsed (time to rope breakage; missing values indicate that breakage was not observed during the monitoring period). These data can be reused to evaluate how drying and rope diameter influence tensile strength, compare snare materials, reanalyse deployment performance metrics, and model breakage times under alternative survival distributions and statistical frameworks. No personally identifiable information is included.