BEGIN seminar – Ms Sian Green
Date: 15 September 2020
Time: 15:00-16:00
Venue: The link for the event will be sent on the morning of the 15th to those that RSVP
Please RSVP at [email protected] until Mon 14th of September to receive the link.
All welcome!
Using camera traps to monitor wildlife at local and national scales
Remotely activated cameras, commonly known as camera traps or trail cameras are an increasingly popular method used in wildlife research. Camera traps cause only a low level of disturbance and can be used to help answer a range of ecological questions, from occupancy and population density to movement and animal behaviour. They can be used to answer such questions at a range of spatial scales, but appropriate survey design is imperative in order to provide reliable data. Camera distribution, placement and set up can all influence the data that is collected. In this talk I will describe two examples of how camera traps can be used to answer ecological questions at very different scales, one from a short-term study of a 14km wildlife corridor in Kenya, and the other from a long-term UK wide citizen science mammal monitoring project, MammalWeb. Within this I will discuss some of the challenges faced when using camera traps for research and monitoring as well as some of solutions currently being put forward.
Biography
Sian Green an IAPETUS DTP funded PhD student in the Departments of Anthropology and Biology at Durham University, supervised by Prof. Russell Hill and Dr. Philip Stephens. I am currently working with the citizen science project ‘MammalWeb’ and my research focuses on analysing methods for camera trap data collection and public engagement. Previous work includes research on the Mount Kenya Elephant Corridor while studying for an M.Res at Southampton University.
