So we have this camera trap dataset with all kinds of problems, and so we've been developing software that identifies the problems with the files prior to any kind of analysis, as a way of cleaning the data.
While we've been doing this, I have become aware of the Wildlife Insights web page, and of course TEAM network.
While both websites state lofty goals, I want to ask this community their opinion of these two websites.
Are they leaders in the field? Has anyone used them? And if so, why?
Thanks
13 June 2016 11:34am
Hi Heidi,
We went through a recent TEAM paper at the DAB stats club a few weeks back. The overall conclusion was that the methods are very robust and will provide a great tool for long term trends. On the other hand the analysis they presented on the Wildlife Picture Index doesn't offer a lot of inference for individual species over short times scales. There are probably other approaches that may be of more interest for you. I have been working a bit with camera trap data from the Harapan Rainforest (Indonesia) and am happy to have a chat some time if that might help.
Tom
22 June 2016 9:40am
Hi Heidi,
Have you looked into TRAPPER as an alternative to team network or wildlfie insights? It's an open source web-based application to manage camera trapping projects.
The developers just published a full write up of the project in Methods of Ecology and Evolution:
Summary
- Camera trapping is increasingly becoming an important tool in ecological research. However, the organization of large collections of multimedia files and especially efficient searching for subsets of data is a challenging task. While the development of project-specific software solutions is dominating in the camera trapping community, little attention has been paid to more flexible and open-source solutions supporting diverse camera trapping research projects.
- We used state of the art and well-recognized open source software components and programming language python to design and implement trapper, a flexible data base driven web application to manage, classify, integrate, share and re-use data in camera trapping projects.
- The main features of trapper are: (i) it is fully open-source, (ii) it facilitates analysis of videos as well as images, (iii) it provides spatial filtering and web-mapping, (iv) it allows flexible implementation of specific data collection protocols, (v) it is a multi-user and role based system which facilitates collaborative work on camera trapping projects, (vi) it supports data re-use and (re)discovery.
- trapper can therefore be widely used by ecologists working with a variety of camera trap studies, alone or in collaboration with each other.
24 June 2016 6:08am
Thank you. I had not seen TRAPPER.
I had seen Snoopy, CameraBase, the Sanderson & Harris executables, and TEAM. And none of them had seemed suitable for the work that I was doing.
I will investigate TRAPPER further.
30 June 2016 4:38am
I like TRAPPERs video capability.
I am yet to test it out though.
Tom Swinfield
Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB)