Javier Monzon has been deploying camera traps for close to two decades. He likens retrieving the equipment and the data to opening a present. “You just don’t know what’s inside until you look,” Monzon, associate professor of biology at Pepperdine University in California, told Mongabay in a video interview. In 2023, Monzon had an opportunity to be part of a wide-scale camera-trap project, and there was no thinking twice. That year, he led a team that deployed 13 camera traps throughout their university campus in Malibu. Over the course of 45 days, the team gathered more than 22,000 individual images, totaling 147 gigabytes, from a shrubland habitat. Monzon’s work is part of an annual initiative that aims to collate a data set of camera-trap images of mammal populations from across the U.S. Launched by the Smithsonian Institution and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in 2019, the Snapshot USA project has received data from universities, Native American reservations, and nonprofit organizations, among others, who have volunteered to deploy camera traps for two months every year. “It takes the pulse of the nation’s wildlife using a standardized protocol,” Monzon said. Earlier this year, the team that runs the project published the data collected over the past five years, which includes more than 890,000 captures of mammals from about 12 million raw images gathered from across the country. “Over time, we can use the data set to look at trends in species diversity, species abundance, and all other kinds of different…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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