In 1845, under the scientific direction of Andreas Wagner, the Bavarian government recorded the occurrence of 44 selected vertebrate species across the entire country. To this end, Wagner had a survey questionnaire sent to all 119 forestry offices in the state. The foresters' responses were now systematically recorded and analyzed for the first time. This data set represents the result of this survey. Among other things, it contains 5,467 geo-coded animal observation data. The data is the result of an interdisciplinary collaboration between scientists from the Chair of Computational Humanities at the University of Passau, the Directorate General of the Bavarian State Archives Munich, the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig, the Center for Biodiversity Informatics and Collection Data Integration at the Botanical Garden Berlin, and the NFDI4Biodiversity consortium.