Every Picture Tells a. St ry. Professionals and Novices Collaborate with Camera Traps BY MARY ELLEN COLLINS

Transcription

1 Every Picture Tells a St ry Professionals and Novices Collaborate with Camera Traps BY MARY ELLEN COLLINS 18 February February 2015

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3 Red Fox What do you get when you put camera traps and the resulting photos together with wildlife-loving volunteers? ritical data for scientific researchers and a more involved and educated public. This win-win approach to data collection is becoming more prevalent as Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA)-accredited facilities reach out to individuals who love the chance to be citizen scientists. Using infrared motion-activated cameras is an easy way to gather valuable information about wildlife distribution without disturbing the animals, and it is a very effective way to encourage volunteers of all ages to develop an interest in the natural environment February 2015

4 Red-Bellied Woodpeckers emammal Into the Woods... and Elsewhere At the Smithsonian National Zoological Park s Conservation Ecology Center, training volunteers to use camera traps has netted much more information than a small staff of professionals could have gathered on their own. Six or seven years ago we got money to look at mammals along the Appalachian Trail from North Carolina through Pennsylvania using camera traps, said Dr. Bill McShea, wildlife ecologist. It was just me and my staff person and we said, There are already volunteers taking care of the Appalachian Trail let s recruit them to take pictures. During that three-year project, McShea recruited and trained approximately 150 Appalachian Trail volunteers on how to calibrate and position the camera traps at the designated Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates. The volunteers later retrieved the cameras and uploaded the images to the Center. With a 90 percent retention rate among members of the group, not to mention thousands of photographs gathered, that model prompted McShea to broaden his efforts. It worked so well that we took the idea to the National Science Foundation and said, We want to do the mammals in the Mid-Atlantic States and use the citizen science model to collect the data. The new program, emammal ( com/emammal), runs on a website ( emammal.wordpress.com) that contains pho- tos amassed by the volunteers who placed camera traps throughout the designated areas. The first project covers 32 national parks from Maryland to South Carolina, and a second project focuses on an urban to wild gradient, which includes placing camera traps in backyards and parks in the Washington, DC, area. McShea has recruited emammal volunteers from Audubon Society chapters, Appalachian Trail, Pennsylvania the Sierra Club, Friends of the National Zoo, the Boy Scouts and area schools. From , 486 volunteers placed cameras at 1,953 locations and collected 42,000 camera nights of data with a whopping 52,836 animal detections. Knowing where the animals are and where they are not is valuable information in conservation efforts, and McShea hopes to expand this field research to other cities. Lisa Cadigan February

5 Christopher Horton, British School of Washington Students from the British School of Washington set up camera traps. The Volunteer Perspective I enjoy science and nature and going into the woods and being with my friends. It s fun to see what s living there, said 10-yearold Viggo Stewart, an emammal participant and a student at the British School of Washington. The school has been involved with McShea s efforts for about three years, said Chris Horton, year six Sydney class teacher. As a school, we volunteered in Dumbarton Oaks Park in Washington, DC, clearing trash from the stream as part of the Rock Creek Conservancy Stream Team initiative, removing invasive species, logging insects and plants and generally helping out. When we heard about emammal, we thought it sounded great for us. Horton went through the training and then taught the fifth and sixth graders in his Eco Club how to calibrate and position the camera traps. Club member Samuel Waghorn, age ten, has learned several things from the camera traps in the park and in his back yard. I didn t know coyotes were in Rock Creek Park, and I knew we had a raccoon in our garden, but I didn t know we had possums. Other emammal volunteers, Kathy and Pete Madsen, were taking a class to become master naturalists in 2009 when they saw the emammal project on a list of volunteer opportunities and jumped at the chance to get involved. The first year, you think, I m just going to walk out in the woods and deploy a camera no big deal, said Pete. You don t consider the thickets and ravines some of these GPS points are not easily gotten to. Despite the occasional challenge, Kathy said, retrieving the camera and getting the first glimpse of photos is just like Christmas morning! The Madsens have enjoyed the experience so much they actually bought their own camera trap, which provides educational entertainment for the whole family. We have two and a half acres that back up to county parkland. We see hawks, possums and raccoons, and the kids and grandkids love it February 2015

6 Raccoon From the Comfort of Home For nature lovers or budding researchers who don t have the time or desire to place and retrieve the camera traps, Chicago Wildlife Watch ( org) offers the perfect opportunity to participate in the photo identification part of the process. Dr. Seth Magle, director of the Urban Wildlife Institute at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, Ill., has been conducting the Chicagoland Biodiversity Study for four years, a project with a very broad focus. Most people had just studied one species, and we decided that what was really needed was to understand the whole ecosystem of an urban environment. We wanted to study how animals adapt to an urban environment and there were few, if any, long-term data sets. Magle s team has deployed more than 100 camera traps in parks, forest preserves, golf courses and cemeteries in a four-county area, resulting in more than one million photos of 65 species of wildlife to date. In order to address the backlog of photos and the daunting challenge of accurately identifying the wildlife in them, the Institute found the answer in Zooniverse, a collection of web-based citizen science projects, and a collaboration between Chicago s Adler Planetarium and the University of Oxford. The result is Chicago Wildlife Watch, which launched in September Anyone, anywhere in the world, can log into this Zooniverse project and go through a simple process to identify whatever animal is present in a photo. The technology tags a photo when there is sufficient agreement about the identification of the animal, and Magle s team only has to look at the small minority of photos about which there is disagreement. It is a terrific tool for everyone from armchair Gray Squirrel naturalists to families to science clubs and classes. We re in the process of getting the word out to school groups and the Zoo membership, said Magle. We may have staff with ipads showing the site to Zoo visitors, and we may put a kiosk with the site in one of our buildings. Not only can anyone actively contribute to scientific research, but they may learn a little bit about our urban wildlife neighbors, and, I hope, feel more connected to the urban ecosystem. emammal February

7 Christopher Horton, British School of Washington Students from the British School of Washington log data. The Next Generation Science-minded teens can now acquire hands-on experience with state-of-the-art research techniques when they attend the North Carolina Zoo Field Research Camp (www. nczs.org/wildscience). The camp is a new and unique initiative that is under the direction of Dr. Corinne J. Kendall, assistant curator of conservation and research at the North Carolina Zoo, and Dr. Jayne Owen Parker, director of communications and education for the North Carolina Zoo Society. It occurred to me that the field research the Zoo does is so important, and so few people really understand it, said Parker. I thought it would be terrific to do a camp like this and Corinne said she had always wanted to do something similar. As far as we know, there is not a camp anywhere in the world that actually teaches field research methods. During the two days and one night spent at the Zoo, campers work alongside scientists and learn how to use an array of research technologies, including radio telemetry, night-vision goggles, drones and camera traps. The camera trap activity is done in tandem with existing camera trap studies, said Kendall. Our Zoo has quite a bit of forested property and our ongoing camera trap project started by looking for bobcats on the property. We re now monitoring a little more broadly because it s helpful to establish what is and isn t there. Students get to see photos from the real studies to inform placement of their own camera traps. Sixteen-year-old Floyd Clapp signed up for the camp because he s thinking about eventually becoming a wildlife biologist or a zoologist. My uncle volunteers at the Zoo a lot and he thought the camp might be something I d be interested in. It looked really cool and it was really cool. I didn t know you could use things like drones and radio telemetry, and all the writing and documenting you have to do was a real surprise February 2015

8 That learning experience is a valuable aspect of any project that pairs pros with volunteers and students. But the time and energy required for camera trap studies is a particularly good opportunity for conservationists to join forces with the large pool of willing and able assistants. And who knows? Those collaborations may well produce a new generation of researchers who attribute their careers to the scientists who first taught them how and why every picture tells a story. Mary Ellen Collins is a St. Petersburg, Fla., based writer. Great-Horned Owl Deer in a forest preserve in the Chicago suburbs. emammal Red Fox emammal emammal February