Robotic monitoring of Alpine screes: a dataset from the EU Natura2000 habitat 8110 in the Italian Alps

Abstract

The surveying of European Union (EU) Annex I habitat "8110 - Siliceous scree of the montane to snow levels (Androsacetalia alpinae and Galeopsietalia ladani)" is generally executed by humans. However, robots could increase human monitoring capabilities. To this end, we collected information on this habitat employing the quadrupedal robot ANYmal C. These data include videos of eight different typical or early warning species. Additionally, data on four relevés are provided. These consist, for instance, of the robot state, and videos and pictures collected to evaluate the habitat conservation status. The aim of this dataset is to help researchers in a variety of fields. For instance, information on plant species collected by the robot can be utilized to develop new procedures and new metrics to assess the habitat conservation status or to train neural networks for plant classification. On the other hand, engineers can use robot state information to validate their algorithms. This database is publicly available in the provided Zenodo repository.