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Camera trapping is a powerful and now widely used tool in scientific research on wildlife ecology and management. It provides a unique opportunity for collecting knowledge, investigating the presence of animals, or recording and studying behaviour. Its visual nature makes it easy to successfully convey findings to a wide audience.
Camera Trapping for Wildlife Research provides a much-needed guide to the sound use of camera trapping for the most common ecological applications to wildlife research. Each phase involved in the use of camera trapping is covered:
- Selecting the right camera type
- Set-up and field deployment of your camera trap
- Defining the sampling design: presence/absence, species inventory, abundance; occupancy at species level; capture-mark-recapture for density estimation; behavioural studies; community-level analysis
- Data storage, management and analysis for your research topic, with illustrative examples for using R and Excel
- Using camera trapping for monitoring, conservation and public engagement.
Each chapter in this edited volume is essential reading for students, scientists, ecologists, educators and professionals involved in wildlife research or management.
1. Introduction
2. Camera features related to specific ecological applications
3. Field deployment of camera traps
4. Camera trap data management and interoperability
5. Presence/absence and species inventory
6. Species-level occupancy analysis
7. Capture–recapture methods for density estimation
8. Behavioural studies
9. Community-level occupancy analysis
10. Camera trapping as a monitoring tool at national and global levels
11. Camera traps and public engagement
Appendices
Glossary
Index
Francesco Rovero is an ecologist and conservation scientist with a PhD in animal ecology. He is currently the Curator for Tropical Biodiversity at MUSE Science Museum in Trento, Italy.
Fridolin Zimmermann is a carnivore conservation scientist with a PhD on Eurasian lynx conservation and ecology. He is currently coordinator of the large carnivore monitoring in Switzerland at Carnivore Ecology and Wildlife Management (KORA).
Collectively they have nearly 30 years of professional experience in the use of camera trapping for wildlife research, and have worked on a range of species, habitat and study types.
- Shortlisted for the The Wildlife Society's 2019 Edited Book award.
"It is well-written, and its few images are well chosen to illustrate and clarify relevant concepts. The structure is sensible, taking the reader from introductory chapters about camera types, deployment and survey design through to more in-depth chapters describing how this information can be analysed and interpreted."
– Mark Wilson, BTO About Birds
"As Professor Luigi Boitani states in his foreword, "This book is exactly what all field biologists need to have to learn about the current state of development of the technique". Based on decades of direct experience, well before the arrival of the modern digital camera trap, the book covers almost all the facets of using "photographic trapping" to obtain data on wildlife.
The entire text is written with a direct approach, taking into account the real-world problems (and their solutions, that the Authors devised in several years of practice) occurring to anyone using capera trapping, from trapping scheme design to data analysis, not excluding new developments such as large-scale monitoring and citizen science.
The impressive, thorough coverage of so many different topics has been achieved thanks to the active participation of other contributors (Jorge A. Ahumada, Eric Fergus, Danilo Foresti, Johanna Hurtado Astaiza, James MacCarthy, Paul Meek, Badru Mugerwa, Timothy G. O'Brien, Daniel Spitale and Simone Tenan, to name a few), that shared their direct experience in the field.
Notwithstanding the practical approach, in each case (and in particiular in the chapters dealing with experimental design and data analysis applications) the theoretical background is just there, briefly recapitulated in a way useful to beginners as an introduction to more in-depth references, but also useful to the expert, as a beneficial refresher."
– Hystrix - Italian Journal of Mammalogy
