Camera traps have been a key part of the conservation toolkit for decades. Remotely triggered video or still cameras allow researchers and managers to monitor cryptic species, survey populations, and support enforcement responses by documenting illegal activities. Increasingly, machine learning is being implemented to automate the processing of data generated by camera traps.
A recent study published showed that, despite being well-established and widely used tools in conservation, progress in the development of camera traps has plateaued since the emergence of the modern model in the mid-2000s, leaving users struggling with many of the same issues they faced a decade ago. That manufacturer ratings have not improved over time, despite technological advancements, demonstrates the need for a new generation of innovative conservation camera traps. Join this group and explore existing efforts, established needs, and what next-generation camera traps might look like - including the integration of AI for data processing through initiatives like Wildlife Insights and Wild Me.
Group Highlights:
Our past Tech Tutors seasons featured multiple episodes for experienced and new camera trappers. How Do I Repair My Camera Traps? featured WILDLABS members Laure Joanny, Alistair Stewart, and Rob Appleby and featured many troubleshooting and DIY resources for common issues.
For camera trap users looking to incorporate machine learning into the data analysis process, Sara Beery's How do I get started using machine learning for my camera traps? is an incredible resource discussing the user-friendly tool MegaDetector.
And for those who are new to camera trapping, Marcella Kelly's How do I choose the right camera trap(s) based on interests, goals, and species? will help you make important decisions based on factors like species, environment, power, durability, and more.
Finally, for an in-depth conversation on camera trap hardware and software, check out the Camera Traps Virtual Meetup featuring Sara Beery, Roland Kays, and Sam Seccombe.
And while you're here, be sure to stop by the camera trap community's collaborative troubleshooting data bank, where we're compiling common problems with the goal of creating a consistent place to exchange tips and tricks!
Header photo: ACEAA-Conservacion Amazonica
Happy World Wildlife Day! To celebrate, this week we've asked our community to share photos showing how they are using tech in the field or the lab, using the #Tech4Wildlife hashtag.
3 March 2019
Arribada recently returned from field sites in Assam, India where they tested the image quality and detection abilities of low-cost thermal sensors for detecting elephants in conflict areas. Arribada is working on these...
1 March 2019
In this case study, Science Reporter Jamie Morton tells the story of how Kiwi scientists are teaming up with a local underwater robotics company to gain world-first insights into the lives of whales in Antarctica.
4 February 2019
Although invaluable for conservation and ecological research, camera traps frequently take pictures of people as well as wildlife. This has important implications for privacy and human rights and may ultimately...
22 November 2018
A team of Brazilian biologists supported by the Conservation Leadership Programme (CLP) is unlocking the secrets of one of the world’s most fragile and threatened biodiversity hotspots thanks to the success of a...
22 November 2018
A comprehensive aerial survey of whales and dolphins off the coast of South Africa supported by a range of organisations including Fauna & Flora International (FFI) has recorded an astounding 1,106 southern right...
22 November 2018
Ted Schmitt joined us for a lunchtime lecture in which he shared his experiences working across Africa the past five years with protected area managers, anti-trafficking organisations, and scientists to effectively...
22 November 2018
In this case study, WILDLABS member Sol Milne takes us through his Ph.D. work investigating how changing land-use is affecting orangutan distribution in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo. With the help of five local research...
22 October 2018
Machine learning is widely recognized as the solution to camera trap data processing, but a user-friendly and broadly-accessible system for putting this tech to use has not yet been developed. In this case study,...
1 October 2018
Motion-sensing wildlife-tracking cameras in South Sudan have captured 425,000 photos, documenting species not previously known to be found in this richly forested area. The team is now asking for your help to identify ...
22 August 2018
In this case study, Sam Seccombe documents his efforts to track down an off-the-shelf remote camera setup with the capability to stream quality, reliable video from the field. As he explains, it was a slighlty more...
25 July 2018
This latest chapter in the Conservation Technology Series from WWF-UK looks at the opportunities, challenges and state-of-the-art of satellite remote sensing for conservation applications. This issue reviews available...
23 April 2018
April 2024
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MegaDetector on Edge Devices ??
19 February 2021 12:30am
27 September 2022 10:19am
Great work Luke @sheneman! Having a relatively lightweight bit of hardware to run MDv5 on will open up opportunities for many more people. The upfront financial cost of a Jetson Nano is an order of magnitude less than a computer with a beefy GPU.
I haven't used any of the Nvidia edge devices yet. Do you think it would be possible for someone to make a disk image with MDv5 pre installed to lower the entry barrier of learning a new system, installing software, environments and packages etc.?
A difficulty I have seen for some projects is not having access to or not having internet bandwidth to utilize cloud compute services. If anyone needs to churn through camera trap image processing in a remote field station this may now be possible!
10 October 2022 12:27pm
Great work, unfortunately, I'm not familiar with programming but computer friendly enough to follow a good tutorial. I was wondering if you will share your findings?
Thanks for the work.
Multi-SD card reading hubs
2 October 2022 3:46am
4 October 2022 2:04am
Good point and nice link. My USB 3.0 (errr USB 3.1 Gen 1) portable HDD gets a real read speed of 133 MBps or ~1Gbps. The theoretical max is 5 Gbps but I think the speed is limited by processor used by the HDD/USB bridge controller. Most SD card readers may be more limited even if the SD card can handle higher data rates. That may be why it could be best to just use the multi-port device from SanDisk.
7 October 2022 4:35pm
Jamie,
I have been using a 12-card Lexar Professional Workflow system for several years to process images from 24 trail cameras. The system has 4 bays, with 3 card readers per bay. I wrote software to automatically download and rename the images using metadata read from the info banner burned into the images by the camera. (Alternatively, the software can use the Exif metadata attached to the image.) The software is described in a recent Wildlife Society Bulletin:
The software is available on github:
Don't be put off by "time-lapse recordings" - it works on still images also.
Regards,
Mike Hilton
8 October 2022 12:22am
Have a look at @tessa_rhinehart 's TechTutors on scaling up acoustic surveys. This is addressed at 11 min:
The "hexadecapus" is the hardware, but transfer is automated by naming the SDCards prior to use and scripts take care of the transfer. The scripts may be written up in the audiomoth guide but the kitzes lab have this on github (although it may be mac specific)
New paper: "Examining primate community occurrence patterns in agroforest landscapes using arboreal & terrestrial camera traps"
30 September 2022 8:03pm
Authors examine occurrence patterns of 7 primate species in agroforests in Guinea-Bissau. Arboreal camera traps detected all 7 species, terrestrial cameras detected 5. Heterogeneous spatial responses amongst primates across the agroforest landscape.
New paper: Battery-free wireless imaging of underwater environments
29 September 2022 3:22pm
'The low-power camera uses power from harvested acoustic energy and communicates colour images wirelessly via acoustic backscatter.' - https://twitter.com/NaturePortfolio/status/1574863768714100738?s=20&t=d…
Most interesting images / sightings 'caught on camera'
12 August 2022 2:50pm
26 August 2022 12:07pm
No - the trap was in their path and they just walked through it. I've now moved it to a place they can't go. The biggest threat to the moths is from pied currawongs. I schedule the trap so it shuts off at least two before sunrise to try to avoid them feasting on the larger insects.
29 August 2022 6:18pm
At first I was finding wings below the screen in the morning when I put our units out. So I put a game camera on the units to see what was feeding and when. I found three bird species, likely 3 individuals, quickly found it to be a good bird feeder- Song Sparrow (most frequent), House Wren, and this Tufted Titmouse. I changed my units to turn off about 1.5 hours before dawn and that worked! Nearly all the moths left the scene before the birds came to visit.
26 September 2022 10:43pm
My most prized camera trap image - a hummingbird caught on camera!
Camera trapping in the tropics
22 August 2022 4:44pm
26 August 2022 12:17pm
26 August 2022 6:15pm
Hi @laydent ,
I am just an occasional and non-professional user of a camera trap in Costa Rica. I have not experienced destruction of the camera trap by animals, so far. The trap never caught a monkey, but it did catch raccoons, an ocelot, pizotes and olingos. They all left the camera trap alone.
Rain would impact animal behavior obviously and possibly result in false positive triggering of the camera due to moving leaves and/or the rain itself. On the latter, one might try different sensitivity settings to see how your particular camera responds.
Camera traps are supposedly water tight ( and mine has been ), but in the long run seals may erode ( direct exposure to the sun may speed that up ). Also, I am wondering if water tight means rain-water tight, leaving the possibility of air humidity coming into the trap and cause corrosion.
Sorry, but I can not recommend anything to your third point.
26 September 2022 10:40pm
I would agree that primates probably aren't your biggest concern, animal-destroyer wise. At least in the Malagasy rainforests, lemurs are highly arboreal so if you have trail cams down low, the lemurs won't come down that far. Neotropical primates are probably similar in that respect (at least compared to African/Asian primates such as baboons & macaques which are more terrestrial). The bigger issue than animals messing up cameras has been people stealing or interfering with them, so trying to put hem off-trail/hidden, locked onto large trees has been important.
I second the Kays et al paper that @Rolandisimo mentioned above as a great reference & starting point! There is also this paper on camera trap study design, this one on camera trap placement bias and this one on strategic camera trap placement for evaluating different metrics.
In terms of wet vs dry season, you'll want to make sure that water doesn't accumulate where you're putting up the cameras such that they would potentially become submerged in a flash flood or river-rising/overflowing situation, but you probably already know that :).
There have been many papers that have looked at the effect of seasonality with camera trap data, but the majority of them are with regard to the actual species activity pattern differences across seasons rather than the effect of season on detection distance. You should consider what your species of interest's activity patterns are in different seasons and how this may impact detection probability. It may also be important in terms of strategically planning your sampling scheme. For example, the mouse & dwarf lemurs in Madagascar hibernate during the cold/dry season so it's not useful to sample for them during those months.
Conservation Tech Directory - new update!
29 August 2022 2:38pm
23 September 2022 5:26pm
Congrats on the milestone Carly and Gracie!
26 September 2022 10:07pm
Thanks so much!!
ISO Alternatives Wanted: Reconyx HF2X HyperFire 2
23 June 2020 5:46pm
30 June 2020 10:47am
Yes, contact me, please!
15 September 2022 9:35pm
Hello!
I am Daniele and I work with camera trapping research in the Mamirauá Institute for Sustainable Development (Amazonas state, Brazil).
We have used with Reconyx HyperFire since the beggining of our monitoring, but now we have a budget to buy new cameras and we are considering to purchase another models. I was looking for some information and saw your answer to this post. Could you please tell me that information on any "cameras that are similar to the Reconyx HyperFire, but that might be a bit less expensive"?
We are considering the Browning Patriot model.
Thank you,
Daniele
26 September 2022 8:10pm
There is this other WILDLABS discussion thread where tons of people provided input on their experiences with lots of different brands & models which may help.
You might also want to check out the Conservation Tech Directory and search 'camera trap' for a list of suppliers/companies & the price range of their products.
MIT engineers build a battery-free, wireless underwater camera
26 September 2022 2:59pm
Avian nest box monitoring
14 September 2022 2:30pm
14 September 2022 3:08pm
Maybe this is a starting point. Any idea if this product would work inside the box. Kestrel DROP D3 Wireless Temperature, Humidity & Pressure Data Logger https://amzn.eu/d/5VdQwtA
23 September 2022 12:34pm
I'd be interested in any camera monitoring setups that can be used inside a nest box. Most camera traps are too bulky for this purpose. All the devices I've looked at either need a wired connection or a wifi network to transmit images. I want one that can store all info to an SD card and preferably be solar powered. Obviously infrared or starlight sensitivity. Sound recording would be a bonus for some bird monitoring I want to do.
23 September 2022 1:16pm
Done lots of this over the years and it depends on the species really. If you want incubation behaviour and hence success or otherwise using temperature then the Thermocron IButton DS1921G is perfect. The new Blue Maestro is an option I became aware of this year but I haven't tested at scale.
In terms of cameras and endoscopes I've tailored many off the shelf products and built a few from scratch. When I get chance I'll have a look around and see what is still available.
Counting insect density automatically with Intel RealSense D455?
31 August 2022 3:54pm
23 September 2022 12:06pm
Might be good to add this to the 'Automated Camera Traps for Insects' group
Senior Conservation Technology Expert Position (Consultancy) with the Global Wildlife Program
22 September 2022 5:35pm
New paper: Environmental DNA as a management tool for tracking artificial waterhole use in savanna ecosystems
19 September 2022 2:43pm
From Max Farrell on Twitter: "New paper comparing eDNA and camera traps for tracking waterhole visitation. We took pictures, analyzed DNA in drinking water, built a reference library for vertebrates in the Kruger, and asked how well these tools work (and why!)"
CamTrap Ecology meets AI conference
14 September 2022 4:47pm
CFP - transnational biodiversity monitoring (from European Biodiversity Partnership)
14 September 2022 1:42pm
Postdoc: Interpretable ML for species-based image classification
1 September 2022 9:34pm
River Otter Camera Traps
21 August 2022 10:02pm
27 August 2022 2:00am
I am a Camera Trapper hobbyist. I have gotten some nice otter videos. You can see them on my you tube channel pheekin trail camera videos. There is nothing on the channel but 15 second videos of animals that I have filmed. I have several otter videos on the channel that I think are pretty good. I found a spot where beaver, mink, and otters were moving between a medium size river and a man made wetland. I set my cameras on the trails. The secret was getting the camera really low on the trees near the trails. If you look at the otter videos the camera is pointed toward the river, just offset of the trail. When placed at 90 degrees to the trail the otters moved too fast for a good video. When offset but looking toward the river, the otters see the camera but most animals still proceeded down the trail toward the wetland. It helped that the river bank was steep and when they got to the top they triggered the camera at the same time they saw the camera. The camera was a true dark flash so they see the camera has and object but do not see the flash. One warning when cameras are set low on a tree the camera really has to be locked in tight. Raccoon and coyote will investigate the camera and some will knock it. Coyotes knocked out of position three of the 4 cameras that I set. Thankfully I got the otters before they knocked the cameras. Hope this helps
28 August 2022 6:15pm
I will take a look and reach out if I have any questions. Thank you so much!
28 August 2022 6:15pm
Good information, Thank you!
Conservation Technology Research Internship
26 August 2022 4:58pm
Postdoc in the application of AI for wildlife conservation & management
26 August 2022 11:47am
Download files through wifi/BT ?
25 August 2022 2:27pm
26 August 2022 1:05am
Wifi SD cards exist
Never tried them personally though. Came across them when looking for ways to make a 3d printer wireless.
Lead Software Engineer for ARISE
19 August 2022 8:22am
Online workshop: analysis of camera trap data with distance sampling
18 August 2022 2:03pm
21 August 2022 7:23am
12 September 2022 6:21pm
Lead Software Engineer, Wildlife Insights
10 August 2022 11:06pm
Building a simple AI-powered, human-in-the-loop system to manage wildlife camera trap images & annotations
10 August 2022 8:12pm
Hi folks! I built out a human-in-the-loop annotation platform for Felidae Conservation Fund, a SF-Bay Area nonprofit last Fall using MegaDetector. I'm looking for feedback from this amazing community around areas of collaboration, especially data/software resources we can share!
Dealing with Cows whilst camera trapping
5 August 2022 11:17am
9 August 2022 12:02am
Hi David,
Harold is correct. Cattle do like to use anything to scratch against. They are also pretty inquisitive.
Cattle don't like shadows or flowing rubbish/ material. So attach a flag post near the camera or build a cage around it. Yet with a cage, cattle will most likely rub up against it.
Never ending cycle of the scratching vs what you don't want moved
9 August 2022 3:22pm
I like the idea of supplying them with a scratching post solution, I will look into that. Thorns/gorse is also a great idea.
Thanks very much for the suggestions! I will let you know what works!
9 August 2022 3:24pm
Hi Kim,
Thanks for the response. I think they can hear our cameras clicking when they are set off and they come to see what is happening so I would totally agree with the inquisitive cows!
I will try the flag idea as building cages is just not going to be practical with soil depth.
Thanks for the suggestion!
Cheers
Dave
Can deep learning identify seabirds? (species, within-species, individual)
25 May 2022 8:24pm
21 June 2022 4:55pm
Update: I asked the same question on twitter so I'm sharing answers I got there:
With quality photos and good labeled training data, I would say definitely doable! @ultralytics and their #YOLOv5 models would be a cool place to start!
— Abram B. Fleishman (@abfleishman) May 26, 2022
Let's chat! We've been training models to run on trail cameras as images/videos are captured, and have worked on migratory birds along coastlines (more info: https://t.co/NzW4GO2Wqp)
— Henrik Cox (@henrik_cox) June 1, 2022
Have a look at this paper:https://t.co/pmvrmvJAuS
— Damien R. Farine (@DamienFarine) May 27, 2022
Individual identification needs tens of pictures per individual of known individuals as training data, which will be the challenge here.
Absolutely feasible, to learn how to train a CNN to identify species from satellite images I did a few tutorials on ID species from photographs. With the right training dataset it should be fairly straightforward. For individuals? Easier on species with clear markers (fins).
— Samanta's Wildlife (@SamantaWildlife) May 27, 2022
21 June 2022 5:41pm
Hi Yvan,
I dropped this into the AI for Conservation slack group as well, you got this reply this morning:
Steph
8 August 2022 11:12am
Hi Yvan,
If you find something which reaches your expectation and especially the ability to identify individual with plumage patterns I will be intereted.
In the same idea that Ultralytics, there is :
Which could probably answer your first and second requirements.
And find here a great website showing all the IA-based camera software, you may find solutions or contact throw this list:
Tiger, Tiger, in the Night... Now Visible in Real Time
5 August 2022 4:07pm
Hardware Advice Needed: Cameras for seabird' nests
12 September 2018 1:16pm
25 October 2018 10:56am
Great to hear, thanks for the update Laura. I'd be curious to hear what the team decides to go with, would you be able to report back what they end up doing?
25 October 2018 1:44pm
Yes of course! I will let you know as soon as they tell me something :)
3 August 2022 6:55am
I'm interested in your findings for the same utilization, so what did you decide to do ?
Identify animal from Image
2 August 2022 1:37am
2 August 2022 2:54am
Hi Jitendra.
If they are still images, many people are using Megadetector to analyze their images. I'm not sure how it will do in species classification, but it can tell you if there are images of interest in the shots. Others here can probably give you more detailed instructions on how to use it to batch process camera trap images.
2 August 2022 10:24am
Have you considered creating a Kaggle competition? If you already have lots of images, and some that have been labelled, then this could be a good way to get people working on a solution
30 August 2022 5:05am
Has anyone tried running the MegaDetector model through an optimizer like Amazon SageMaker Neo? It can reduce the overall memory footprint and possibly speed up inference on devices like Raspberry Pi and Jetson.