Thermal imaging demonstrates physiological responses to grooming interactions and audience effects in wild baboons

This dataset comprises 1,583 thermal observations of wild chacma baboons (Papio ursinus) in Namibia, collected during grooming, foraging, and resting behaviours. Observations include metadata on date, troop, environmental temperature, individual identity, behavioural context, audience composition, number of repeated images in a session under the same condition, and nasal temperature measurements extracted from infrared thermal images. Data were collected under natural conditions and processed using ThermoView Pro software, with images manually annotated for quality. Of the 1,626 original images captured, 43 were excluded due to environmental confounds (e.g., direct sun, wind) or data scarcity based on age group (e.g., infants). The dataset is structured at the session-observation level and includes repeated measures across individuals. It supports research on social physiology, emotional proxies in animals, audience effects, and the application of non-invasive thermal imaging in behavio..., , # Data from: Thermal imaging demonstrates physiological responses to grooming interactions and audience effects in wild baboons

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.r2280gbrc](10.5061/dryad.r2280gbrc)

## Description of the data and file structure

This dataset includes 1,583 observations of wild chacma baboons (Papio ursinus) collected using infrared thermal imaging between May and July 2023 at Tsaobis Nature Park, Namibia. The dataset accompanies the manuscript: \"Thermal imaging demonstrates physiological responses to grooming interactions and audience effects in wild baboons\" (Jao et al., 2024).

A total of 1,626 thermal images were originally collected. Of those, 43 images were excluded due to environmental confounds (e.g., direct sun, wind) or data scarcity based on age group (e.g., infants). The remaining 1,583 observations comprise the cleaned and analysis-ready dataset.

Each row corresponds to one observation and includes contextual metadata such as date, troop, environmental temperatu...,