Camera-trap Conundrums

You are probably aware that the 225 camera traps of Snapshot Serengeti are set out in a grid pattern, spaced every 1km over a part of the Serengeti National Park. It sounds relatively simple but actually there is a lot of painstaking scientific pondering as to how exactly to set out your camera traps.
Over the last couple of decades there has been much debate as to the best way to design a camera trap study. The main choice, in terms of placement pattern, is whether to place your camera traps randomly or selectively and what kind of spacing/density to use.
Truly random is to grid your study site and then let a computer randomly choose which grid squares to place the cameras. Alternately you can choose a line or grid and place your camera trap at regular intervals regardless of where that may fall, still a random point. With selective placement each site is carefully chosen for a specific feature.
In reality most projects use a mixture of the above methods and the best method is really determined by what your scientific question is. For instance, if you where trying to acess the number of leopards in a given area it is better to place your camera traps strategically in places you know or guess leopards are most likely to pass rather than using a randomised method. However if you are carrying out a census of an area and wish to know what species are present then a randomised grid is ideal.
As I said a mix of methods is often used. Imagine setting out a grid in the comfort of your office on your computer. It looks good, covers a large area and promises good results. Once out in the field you navigate to your carefully worked out GPS reference point only to discover it is slap bang in the middle of a marsh or in a thick overgrown patch of thorn trees. This is where the scientists allow themselves a little leeway. Often they will take the GPS point as home base but choose an ideal spot within a certain radius of this point where perhaps there is a game trail or some other sign of animals passing, thus allowing them to select a good site within the vicinity.
I have recently had experience of this type of placement and I can say the work done in selecting your study site and then laying out your grid onto a map is laborious but not nearly as much as stomping through the bush keeping your fingers crossed that your next randomly selected site will be perfect. Turning up to emplacement three to find a thick tangle of vegetation is a little soul destroying, mostly you wonder if any animal is likely to bother to pass that way. The reality is that you normally find a spot that is better within 10 meters and with some slight pruning of the vegetation the sites can often turn out remarkably productive.
So that is the placement sorted but there is a long list of other agonising variables to consider, what settings to use on the camera trap itself, how many to use and how long to keep them up. Believe me every scientist designing studies deliberates the pros and cons of these factors and worries incessantly about if they have made the right choice. You don’t want to set up all you camera traps and leave them for a few months only to find your set up was not great, something which happened to me recently when I chose to set the camera trap on high sensitivity to make sure I had every chance of capturing the small, fast critters. The problem was it was so hot, 40°c plus, that the ambient waves of heat set the camera trap off almost permanently between 12pm and 5pm leaving me with 2000 images of nothing. I have had to compromise and reduce the sensitivity to avoid all the miss triggers; hopefully it won’t miss too many small things.
Snapshots camera traps have now been up for over 7 years so most of these teething problems have been ironed out. But as with the best laid plan you cannot control everything, the odd camera still malfunctions as I am sure that our regular classifiers can attest to!

Camera-trap