Data on three-year flowering intensity monitoring in an apple orchard: A collection of RGB images acquired from unmanned aerial vehicles

There is a growing body of literature that recognises the importance of UAVs in precision agriculture tasks. Currently, flowering thinning tasks in orchard management rely on the decisions derived from time-consuming manual flower cluster counting in the field by an agrotechnician. Yet it is hard to guarantee the counting accuracy due to numerous human factors. The present dataset contains UAV images during the full blooming period of an apple orchard for three consecutive years, 2018, 2019, and 2020. It is directly linked to a research article entitled “Feasibility assessment of tree-level flower intensity quantification from UAV RGB imagery: A triennial study in an apple orchard”. The data collection site was an apple orchard located at Randwijk, Overbetuwe, The Netherlands (51.938, 5.7068 in WGS84 UTM 31U). Moreover, the flower cluster number and floridity ground truth are also provided in one row from the orchard. The UAV flights were conducted with different flying altitudes, camera resolutions, and lighting conditions. This dataset aims to support researchers focussing on remote sensing, machine vision, deep learning, and image classification, and the stakeholders interested in precision horticulture and orchard management. It can be used for flowering intensity estimation and prediction, and spatial and temporal flowering variability mapping by using digital photogrammetry and 3D reconstruction.