Project designs for running camera traps across small and large landscapes. — Promaco Conventions

Project designs for running camera traps across small and large landscapes. (#19)

Roland Kays 1
  1. North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and NC State University, Raleigh, North Carolina, United States of America

Camera traps are great tools to measure the movement of animals across a narrow swath of land in front of the sensor, thus providing a sample of the animals that use an area. By running an array of cameras across a landscape, many samples can be accumulated and used to describe the local animal community. This workshop session on camera trap study design will address the question of how exactly cameras should be deployed to collect appropriate data to address research questions through quantitative analysis of occupancy, detection rate, or animal density. We will show examples of study designs for a short-term and long term monitoring of animals that use a protected area, as well as strategies for surveying large areas such as states or entire countries. We will discuss the spatial dependence of data and the appropriate minimum distance needed to keep samples independent. Finally, we will discuss the costs and benefits of working with citizen scientists to scale up data collection over large areas, and show how eMammal tools can help manage these volunteers, images, and data.  

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