Camera trapping in Africa: Paving the way for ease of use and consistency

Abstract

First paragraph: Camera traps—and the data they generate—continue to revolutionise the way we study and monitor terrestrial mammals across the globe, from its poles to its highest mountain tops. Such monitoring is crucial at a time of unprecedented biodiversity loss (Ceballos, Ehrlich, & Dirzo, 2017) and need for reliable ecological information to support environmental policy. In this context, camera trapping has proven to be a very versatile tool, allowing detailed studies of animal behaviour, species populations and ecological communities, including how these respond to anthropogenic pressures (Burton et al., 2015). This versatility has resulted in a myriad of different camera models, study designs, data treatment software and analysis methods being applied to systems all across the world. While this is good news for small‐scale decision‐making, there is a growing call for the standardisation of camera trap studies globally, including field protocols, databases, metadata and analyses (Steenweg et al., 2017). Such a standardised approach has already provided invaluable insights into global mammal community patterns (Ahumada et al., 2011), mammalian carnivore distribution and co‐occurrence (Davis et al., 2018; Rich et al., 2017), and paved the way for an early warning system for defaunation in tropical rainforests (Rovero & Ahumada, 2017).