An annotated dataset of images of Chinese giant salamanders

As a national second-class protected animal in China, the wild Chinese giant salamander is also listed as critically endangered by the IUCN. Due to the particularity of the behavioral rhythm of wild Chinese giant salamander, it mainly appears at night, mainly in river sections and fine direct current, and the light is complex and dim, resulting in insufficient coverage and high detection difficulty, so the number of images of wild Chinese giant salamander is extremely rare. This paper proposes a dataset of 1386 images of the Chinese giant salamander, annotated according to the official YOLO specification and seamlessly compatible with the popular object detection frameworks YOLOv8 and YOLOv11.