Cetacean digital photography and aerial observer data collected by an unmanned aerial vehicle and manned aerial vehicle in the Beaufort Sea for the Arctic Aerial Calibration Experiments (ACEs) from 2015-08-26 to 2015-09-07 (NCEI Accession 0204167)

This dataset includes two comma separated files containing data and metadata from three cetacean observation methods from two platforms, the manned Turbo Commander aircraft and the unmanned ScanEagle. The ACEs' imagery described here was collected and analyzed in order to conduct a 3-way comparison of data and derived statistics from the following: Observers in the manned aircraft; Digital photographs from cameras mounted to the manned aircraft; Digital photographs from cameras mounted to the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). The Arctic Aerial Calibration Experiments (ACEs) study was designed to evaluate the ability of UAS technology (i.e., airframe, payloads, sensors, and software) to detect cetaceans, identify individuals to species, estimate group size, identify calves, and estimate density in arctic waters, relative to conventional aerial surveys conducted by human observers in fixed wing aircraft and to photographic strip transect data collected from the manned aircraft.