Robotic Monitoring of Forests: a Dataset from the EU habitat 9210* in the Tuscan Apennines (Central Italy)

Data collected between the 27th and the 28th of April 2022, in Chiusi Della Verna, Arezzo 52010 (AR), Italy, inside the Natura 2000 SAC IT5180101. The data has been acquired mainly by the legged robot ANYmal C guided by a team of both roboticists and plant scientists. The dataset contains three different sets of data: 1) species data - photos and videos of three typical species of the habitat 9210. 2) mapping data - three dimensional point clouds of the habitat environment. 3) monitoring mission data - photos and videos taken by the robot during the surveys, robot status, and external videos of the mission. Researchers from a variety of disciplines can benefit from using this dataset because of its multidisciplinary scope. On the one hand, robotic engineers could, for instance, benchmark the performance of the robots and test or validate their own methods using the point clouds and the information about the robot state. On the other hand, botanists could evaluate the accuracy of this data as well as the habitat's conditions using the plant videos and images that the robot captured, or computer scientists could test their AI algorithms for identifying and classifying different species using these data.This research is partially supported by the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement No. 101016970 (Natural Intelligence), in part by the Ministry of University and Research (MUR) as part of the PON 2014-2021 "Research and Innovation" resources – Green/Innovation Action - DM MUR 1062/2021, and in part by the Italian Ministry of Education and Research (MIUR) in the framework of the FoReLab project (Departments of Excellence). The authors acknowledge the support of NBFC to the University of Siena, funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research, PNRR, Missione 4 Componente 2, "Dalla ricerca all'impresa", Investimento 1.4, Project CN00000033