This red-green-blue (RGB) orthomosaic is composite created from 8994 photographs collected withunmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) over the eastern part of Qikiqtaruk, Herschel Island, in the Canadian Yukon (69.5N, 138.8W). The images were collected on the 10th and 11th of August 2017. Further details on the image processing are provided in the Lineage section. This dataset was created by Andrew Cunliffe, with support from Isla Myers-Smith, William Palmer, Jeffrey Kerby and other members of Team Shrub (https://teamshrub.com/), in order to inform ongoing ecological monitoring studies in this area. Part of this orthomosaic was used for a study into permafrost coastline retreat, published in The Cryosphere (Cunliffe, A. M., Tanski, G., Radosavljevic, B., Palmer, W. F., Sachs, T., Lantuit, H., Kerby, J. T., and Myers-Smith, I. H.: Rapid retreat of permafrost coastline observed with aerial drone photogrammetry, The Cryosphere, 13, 1513-1528, https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-13-1513-2019, 2019).

This dataset consists of (i) 673 red-green-blue (RGB) images, (ii) precise coordinates of ground control points and harvest plot corners, (iii) the photogrammetrically reconstructed dense point cloud (comprising of 228,315,000 points with XYZ and RGB values), (iv) four normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI) maps, (v) aboveground biomass data from harvest plots, and (vi) observations of the ground surface obtained from a walkover survey with a GNSS instrument. These data were collected over the eastern part of Qikiqtaruk - Herschel Island, in the Canadian Yukon (69.5N, 138.8W). The images were collected in July and August 2016. Further details on the image processing are provided in the lineage section. This dataset was created by Andrew Cunliffe, with support from Isla Myers-Smith, Jakob Assmann, Jeffery Kerby and Gergana Daskalova (https://teamshrub.com/), in order to inform ongoing ecological monitoring studies in this area. This research was supported by the Natural Environment Research Council (NE/M016323/1), and the NERC Geophysical Equipment Facility (GEF:1063).