discussion / Camera Traps  / 7 June 2016

Discussion: Opinion of TEAM network and Wildlife Insights

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




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

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

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. trapper can therefore be widely used by ecologists working with a variety of camera trap studies, alone or in collaboration with each other.

 

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.