What we’ve seen so far, Part IV

Last week I wrote about using really simple approaches to interpret camera trap data. Doing so makes the cameras a really powerful tool that virtually any research team around the world can use to quickly survey an ecosystem.

Existing monitoring projects in Serengeti give us a really rare opportunity to actually validate our results from Snapshot Serengeti: we can compare what we’re seeing in the cameras to what we see, say, from radio-tracking collared lions, or to the number of buffalo and elephants counted during routine flight surveys.

Ingela scanning for lions from the roof of the car.

One of the things we’ve been hoping to do with the cameras is to use them to understand where species are, and how those distributions change. As you know, I’ve struggled a bit with matching lion photographs to known lion ranging patterns. Lions like shade, and because of that, they are drawn to camera traps on lone, shady trees on the plains from miles and miles away.

But I’ve finally been able to compare camera trap captures to know distributions for other animals. Well, one other animal: giraffes.  From 2008-2010, another UMN graduate student, Megan Strauss, studied Serengeti giraffes and recorded where they were. By comparing her data with camera trap data, we can see that the cameras do okay.

The graph below compares camera trap captures to known densities of giraffes and lions. Each circle represents a camera trap; the bigger the circle, the more photos of giraffes (top row) or lions (bottom row). The background colors reflect known relative densities measured from long-term monitoring: green means more giraffes or lions; tan/white means fewer. For giraffes, on the whole, we get more giraffe photos in places that have more giraffes. That’s a good sign. The scatterplot visualizes the map in a different way, showing the number of photos on the y-axis vs. the known relative densities on the x-axis.

What we see is that cameras work okay for giraffes, but not so much for lions. Again, I suspect that this has a lot to do with the fact that lions are incredibly heat stressed, and actively seek out shade (which they then sleep in for 20 hours!). But lions are pretty unique in their extreme need for shade, so cameras probably work better for most other species. We see the cameras working better for giraffes, which is a good sign.

We’ve got plans to explore this further. In fact, Season 7 will overlap with a wildebeest study that put GPS collars on a whole bunch of migratory wildebeest. For the first time, we’ll be able to compare really fine scale data on the wildebeest movements to the camera trap photos, and we can test even more precisely just how well the cameras work for tracking large-scale animal movements.  Exciting!