Carolina critters: a collection of camera trap data from wildlife surveys across North Carolina.

Camera trap surveys are useful to understand animal species population trends, distribution, habitat preference, behavior, community dynamics, periods of activity, and species associations with environmental conditions. This information is ecologically important since many species play important roles in local ecosystems as predators, herbivores, seed dispersers, and disease vectors. Additionally, many of the larger wildlife species detected by camera traps are economically important through hunting, trapping, or ecotourism. Here we present a data set of camera trap surveys from 6,043 locations across all 100 counties of North Carolina, USA from 2009 to 2019. These data come from 26 survey initiatives and contain 215,108 records of 36 mammal species and three species of terrestrial birds. This large data set increases the geographical distribution data for these 39 mammal and bird species by >500% over what is available for North Carolina in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). These data can be used to conduct inquiries about species, populations, communities, or ecosystems, and to produce useful information on wildlife behavior, distribution, and interactions. There are no copyright restrictions. Please cite this paper when using the data for publication.