Monitoring wild animal communities with arrays of motion sensitive camera traps

Studying animal movement and distribution is of critical importance to addressing environmental challenges including invasive species, infectious diseases, climate and land-use change. Motion sensitive camera traps offer a visual sensor to record the presence of a broad range of species providing location -specific information on movement and behavior. Modern digital camera traps that record video present new analytical opportunities, but also new data management challenges. This paper describes our experience with a terrestrial animal monitoring system at Barro Colorado Island, Panama. Our camera network captured the spatio-temporal dynamics of terrestrial bird and mammal activity at the site - data relevant to immediate science questions, and long-term conservation issues. We believe that the experience gained and lessons learned during our year long deployment and testing of the camera traps as well as the developed solutions are applicable to broader sensor network applications and are valuable for the advancement of the sensor network research. We suggest that the continued development of these hardware, software, and analytical tools, in concert, offer an exciting sensor-network solution to monitoring of animal populations which could realistically scale over larger areas and time spans.

[1]  J. Andrew Royle,et al.  ESTIMATING SITE OCCUPANCY RATES WHEN DETECTION PROBABILITIES ARE LESS THAN ONE , 2002, Ecology.

[2]  S. S. Stevens,et al.  Noninvasive Survey Methods for Carnivores , 2010 .

[3]  Wen Hu,et al.  Design and Deployment of a Remote Robust Sensor Network: Experiences from an Outdoor Water Quality Monitoring Network , 2007 .

[4]  Deborah Estrin,et al.  Next Century Challenges: Mobile Networking for Smart Dust , 1999, MobiCom 1999.

[5]  Sartaj Sahni,et al.  Approximation Algorithms for Sensor Deployment , 2007, IEEE Transactions on Computers.

[6]  S. Sitharama Iyengar,et al.  On efficient deployment of sensors on planar grid , 2007, Comput. Commun..

[7]  Andreas Willig,et al.  Protocols and Architectures for Wireless Sensor Networks , 2005 .

[8]  R. Kays,et al.  Quantifying the sensitivity of camera traps: an adapted distance sampling approach , 2011 .

[9]  James C. Kroll,et al.  Infrared-triggered cameras for censusing white-tailed deer , 1997 .

[10]  S. Willows‐Munro,et al.  DNA-led rediscovery of the giant sable antelope in Angola , 2006, European Journal of Wildlife Research.

[11]  Héctor H. González-Baños,et al.  A randomized art-gallery algorithm for sensor placement , 2001, SCG '01.

[12]  John Anderson,et al.  An analysis of a large scale habitat monitoring application , 2004, SenSys '04.

[13]  Samuel T. Turvey,et al.  Estimating animal density using camera traps without the need for individual recognition , 2008 .

[14]  Pau-Choo Chung,et al.  An improved algorithm for two-image camera self-calibration and Euclidean structure recovery using absolute quadric , 2004, Pattern Recognit..

[15]  R. Lord,et al.  Radiotelemetry of the Respiration of a Flying Duck , 1962, Science.

[16]  Per Wegge,et al.  Effects of trapping effort and trap shyness on estimates of tiger abundance from camera trap studies , 2004 .

[17]  R. Kays,et al.  A Comparison of Noninvasive Techniques to Survey Carnivore Communities in Northeastern North America , 2006 .

[18]  Wei Hong,et al.  A macroscope in the redwoods , 2005, SenSys '05.

[19]  Olivier D. Faugeras,et al.  A theory of self-calibration of a moving camera , 1992, International Journal of Computer Vision.

[20]  John Anderson,et al.  Wireless sensor networks for habitat monitoring , 2002, WSNA '02.

[21]  Krishnendu Chakrabarty,et al.  Sensor placement for effective coverage and surveillance in distributed sensor networks , 2003, 2003 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking, 2003. WCNC 2003..

[22]  N. Yoccoz.  Occupancy Estimation and Modeling. Inferring patterns and dynamics of species occurrence , 2006 .

[23]  P. Turchin.  Quantitative analysis of movement : measuring and modeling population redistribution in animals and plants , 1998 .

[24]  E. Leigh,et al.  Tropical Forest Ecology: A View from Barro Colorado Island , 1999 .

[25]  Nael B. Abu-Ghazaleh,et al.  Infrastructure tradeoffs for sensor networks , 2002, WSNA '02.

[26]  François Ingelrest,et al.  SensorScope: Out-of-the-Box Environmental Monitoring , 2008, 2008 International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (ipsn 2008).

[27]  E. Revilla,et al.  A movement ecology paradigm for unifying organismal movement research , 2008, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[28]  Bernhard P. Wrobel,et al.  Multiple View Geometry in Computer Vision , 2001 .

[29]  J. Nichols,et al.  Tigers and their prey: Predicting carnivore densities from prey abundance. , 2004, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[30]  Alexander S. Szalay,et al.  Life Under Your Feet: An End-to-End Soil Ecology Sensor Network, Database, Web Server, and Analysis Service , 2007, ArXiv.

[31]  J. Nichols,et al.  ESTIMATION OF TIGER DENSITIES IN INDIA USING PHOTOGRAPHIC CAPTURES AND RECAPTURES , 1998 .

[32]  Richard Han,et al.  Comprehensive monitoring of CO2 sequestration in subalpine forest ecosystems and its relation to global warming , 2006, SenSys '06.

[33]  John A. Stankovic,et al.  LUSTER: wireless sensor network for environmental research , 2007, SenSys '07.

[34]  L. Campbell,et al.  Historical and contemporary distributions of carnivores in forests of the Sierra Nevada, California, USA , 2005 .

[35]  Zhengyou Zhang,et al.  A Flexible New Technique for Camera Calibration , 2000, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..

[36]  E. Ritchie.  Noninvasive Survey Methods for Carnivores , 2009 .

[37]  Deborah Estrin,et al.  Habitat monitoring: application driver for wireless communications technology , 2001, CCRV.

[38]  Thomas A. Decker,et al.  An evaluation of territory mapping to estimate fisher density , 2001 .

[39]  James D Nichols,et al.  Assessing tiger population dynamics using photographic capture-recapture sampling. , 2006, Ecology.

[40]  Richard Han,et al.  FireWxNet: a multi-tiered portable wireless system for monitoring weather conditions in wildland fire environments , 2006, MobiSys '06.

[41]  Helene C. Muller-Landau,et al.  Large-scale spatial variation in palm fruit abundance across a tropical moist forest estimated from high-resolution aerial photographs , 2008 .