Camera-traps and wildlife conservation: a modern ecological monitoring and research tool
With a walk into a tropical forest, a viewer would certainly will miss out on sighting 90% of the animals therein; whereas in an open savannah, animal sightings of up to 50% may be detectable at an instance. Animals thriving within these forested and savannah habitats are highly sensitive to their environments and habitats way faster than a human would do. This over time has presented an enormous barrier to wildlife conservation interventions, acquisition of primary field data to inform conservation decisions and action plans within most wildlands across the globe. This significantly has also presented a huge barrier towards research efforts involving in-situ conservation and ecological monitoring and research endeavors.
With the advent and adoption of camera traps and a wide array of passive sensors, we now have technologies that aid collection of information we probably would be unable to obtain by direct physical means. These camera traps are designed to cover a wide area and field of view, with a majority that possess inbuilt infrared vision spectra for night vision. The inbuilt sensors are capable of detecting both sound and motion within their field of view, capturing images for analysis. Images captured are capable of providing critical information about animal behavior, movement patterns and both interspecific and intraspecific interactions among various animal species and their environments and also any forms of illegal activities as may be ongoing within wildlands. These also aid in obtaining quality and timely information that is relevant for ecological monitoring and research endeavors.
The use of the camera-trap technology is increasingly taking trend in the field of wildlife conservation and most specifically research all-round the globe. With lots of highly emerging negative and adverse impacts of human interactions and natural disastrous causes on wildlife, modern technologies to conservation have provided an efficient and accurate tool to collect data more easily, measure the impacts and magnitudes of threat, analyse and come up with feasible and highly practical interventions and most significantly inform conservation decisions and agenda. Among these adverse impacts include both human induced; poaching, encroachment and illegal wildlife trafficking and natural calamities and catastrophes; volcanic eruptions, predator-prey imbalances among others which often interfere with ecological and wild habitat integrity.
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