Collaborative Research: Processes Determining the Abundance of Terrestrial Wildlife Communities Across Large Scales

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Understanding the processes determining abundance of terrestrial wildlife communities across large scales and estimating the abundance of wildlife across large areas remain a major challenge. For most species, the factors that regulate their distribution and yearly fluctuations in population size are unknown. This project takes advantage of the key innovation of using motion sensitive camera traps as a network of sensors for estimating animal abundance. This new approach can produce abundance data for any terrestrial animal greater than 100g, typically about 60% of the terrestrial animals in the eastern USA. Furthermore, the method is amenable to citizen science programs, without the biases or data quality issues typical of other programs, opening the possibility of a sustainable dense sampling effort across large areas. Software will be developed efficiently enter and to manage camera images and associated data. Using standardize field techniques citizens groups will sample their local wildlife communities with cameras. The resulting data will be analyzed using new multi-scale statistical models to discover the processes regulating wildlife abundance over large areas. Mapping the local abundance of wildlife populations across broad areas will be key to understanding the mechanisms responsible for changes resulting from land-management decisions and regional climate variation. By involving citizens in data collection this project will be helping local wildlife populations. All data and images will be made freely available online, providing a tool not only for scientists, but also to give the public a new window into the animal communities of their region.