Wildlife Insights: How Camera Trap Data Can Foster Global Biodiversity
Conservation
Abstract
Human activities are driving environmental and climatic changes,
affecting the distribution and diversity of species worldwide. Limiting
the negative impacts of these activities on wildlife requirestimely
knowledge of status and trends in populations over large scales. Camera
trapping providesopportunities to simultaneously collect information on
several species over large spatio-temporalscales. However, the time
required to process large collections of images, the statistical
andprogrammatic skills needed to analyze large sets of data, and a
general lack of homogeneity in metadata standards hinder the use of
camera trapping for local and global conservation. WildlifeInsights
(http://wildlifeinsights.org/; WI) is a web platform that promotes and
supports the use andsharing of camera-trap data for species conservation
and promotes the mobilization of records thatotherwise might be
permanently siloed in private data-storage units or lost over time. WI
speeds upthe processing of images via an AI model trained to classify
>700 species, and automates commonstatistical analysis
through a standardized, accessible user interface. It also provides
tools to addresscommon issues faced by camera trappers, such as the need
of hiding locations of sensitive speciesand removing images of humans,
and has a transparent infrastructure to request, share and citedatasets.
Although only recently open to the public, the platform already hosts
tens of millionsrecords, most of which publicly accessible, from more
than 50 countries and 1000 species. Using datashared in WI, we assessed
whether information collected using camera traps improved the
spatial,temporal, taxonomical, and ecological coverage of many species
compared to records available inmore traditional open-access
repositories such as GBIF. Birds and mammals, and countries with ahigh
proportion of remote areas and biodiversity had the largest increases in
coverage. Compared toother traditional methods, camera traps also
provided fi ner-resolution temporal information, oftenreplicated over
time. Our results showed the importance of sharing camera-trap data for
conservationand highlights WI’s role as an invaluable resource to timely
inform biodiversity conservation in achanging world