Over the past three decades, camera traps have given us a rare, never-before-seen peek into animal lives. Used by conservation organizations, academic researchers and citizen science projects around the world, camera traps have become the gold standard in monitoring biodiversity and studying cryptic and elusive species in the wild. However, a first-of-its-kind study published in the journal Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation finds that camera traps remain missing from areas that could really use them. “You can think of a camera trap as an automatic and restless field assistant that sits in the field, rain or shine, day or night, [and] just captures [images or videos of] whatever walks in front of it,” says Jorge Ahumada, a tropical biologist who leads the largest camera trapping platform in the world, called Wildlife Insights. “It’s just collecting a lot of information in a standardized way, which will not be possible by humans.” With the planet’s biodiversity declining rapidly due to human activities — from poaching and agricultural expansion, to road construction and mining — data from camera traps can help conservationists keep a pulse on the health, numbers and behaviors of different wildlife species. It can also tell us if specific conservation actions are actually working. All that’s true if we deploy camera traps in the right places: biodiversity hotspots that face the highest threats. However, the new study found a massive disparity between locations of camera trap studies and regions with the highest risk of mammalian extinction, such as the…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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