Data from: Drones reveal spatial patterning of sympatric Alaskan pinniped species and drivers of their local distributions
This dataset features raw drone imagery, photogrammetric surface models and orthomosaic products, derived terrain rasters, and pinniped locations from a survey of Otter Island, AK, conducted on September 3, 2018. The study that uses these data leverages emerging remote sensing techniques to reveal fine-scale drivers of distribution and terrestrial habitat use of two sympatric sentinel species of the central Bering Sea, the Pacific harbor seal (Phoca vitulina richardsi) and the northern fur seal (Callorhinus ursinus), at non-breeding haul-outs in the Pribilof Islands. We surveyed these species using unoccupied aircraft systems with thermal and visible-light photography, and we applied distributional modeling techniques to quantify the relative influence of habitat characteristics and social dynamics on the local distributions of these species.