An empirical evaluation of camera trap study design: how many, how long, and when?
Data files
Jan 30, 2020 version files 266.85 MB
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Data_Dictionary.rtf
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seasonal.zip
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Spatial_Raw_detections.csv
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Temporal_Detection_rate.csv
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Temporal_Species_diversity_accumulation.zip
Abstract
Methods
We used camera trap data already available through repositories or collaborators. Most data came from the eMammal or TEAM repositories. We also used one data set (China) from collaborators that was not already archived.
All camera traps were set similarly, in being placed on a tree at 0.5m facing parallel to the ground, with no bait. A variety of camera models were used, but all had infrared flashes and fast (<0.5s) trigger times. Camera trap designs were either regular (grid) or stratified random.
Usage notes
For this paper we wanted to asess the importance of three things to camera trap study design: amount of locations surveyed (spatial), amount of time each survey ran (temporal), and rather season mattered (seasonal). We broke into three teams to analyze these data, and used three slightly different collections of data for each team. Thus, you will find three datasets labeled as to which analyses they were part of: spatial, temporal, or seasonal.
All data is presented as raw detection data, giving the date, time, and species for each time photograph was recorded. These are organized as 'deployments' representing a time period a camera was placed in a given location.
We are including a TXT file with the Data Dictionary from eMammal that describes all the standard fields. A few files have additional fields we added that should be self explanatory.