Time lapse camera videos for monitoring snow and vegetation evolution in 2018 on Samoylov and Kurungnakh islands, Lena Delta, Russia

Ten time lapse cameras (Brinno TLC200) were installed in the central Lena River Delta, Siberia, during the RU-Land_2018_Lena field campaign. The cameras were set up on Kurungnakh Island in April 2018 to shoot footage of the 2018 snow melt and shooting season. The measurement sites cover different landscape settings and thermo-erosional landforms, including flat tundra surface of the first terrace, flat surfaces of Yedoma Ice Complex uplands, steep thermo-erosional gullies, gentle slopes of thermo-erosional valleys and the river valley of the main outlet of Kurungnakh Island. A detailed overview of covered terrain is included in the event table. The mounting positions and monitored terrains reflect the different applications for time-lapse monitoring. These were:

1. monitoring of snow distribution and melt in thermo-erosional landforms
2. monitoring of vegetation dynamics in representative landscape units

Nine TLCs were mounted onto a 2 m profiled aluminum pole using a Netatmo Weather Station Mount. The pole itself was drilled roughly 1 m into the ground (below the active layer) and frozen into place with water. One camera (KUR18-TLC-2B) was installed onto a previously installed metal rod. The installation height varied according to needs of the required field of view (FOV) between 1.1 – 1.9 m above ground. The cameras were set to shoot one frame per hour and encode the timestamp in UTC timezone within the frame. Most TLCs logged from the end of April to mid June 2018, covering the period of still undisrupted snow cover to successive snow melt and onset of leaf out and shooting. Some cameras were able to log until late August 2018, monitoring leaf out, shooting and coloring of the vegetation. Both, the length of the monitoring period and image quality were mainly determined by battery life and ground stability. We experienced that more exposed cameras had increased energy consumption leading to early battery failures. Failing batteries resulted in highly distorted (artifacts and ghost images within images) or repeated images towards the end of the time-lapse videos. Additionally, active thermal erosion of the ice-rich permafrost lead to slope instabilities which in turn tilted the mounting poles. Hence, the camera view changed abruptly at affected locations. This dataset contains the unprocessed time-lapse videos of every installed camera. Given the circumstances described before, we decided, however, to crop the raw footage to the last frame with a readable and logically correct time stamp. Time-lapse videos of cameras which showed signs of failure but recovered, were left as is.