Cameras, volunteers help take wildlife tally

At this moment, wild creatures all over Wisconsin are unwittingly having their picture taken.

A total of 1,300 trail cameras — soon to be expanded to as many as 5,000 — have been deployed across the state in an ambitious effort to combine citizen science and technology to improve wildlife management.

“The scale of this is leading edge,” Phil Townsend, a professor of forest and wildlife ecology at the University of Wisconsin, said at the North American Congress for Conservation Biology this week in Toronto. “We want a better way to monitor animal populations at broad scales.”

Obtaining an accurate census of wildlife is costly and difficult, even in B.C., where debate has raged for years over lack of funding for such work, including for grizzly bears. A “remote camera grid” of 90 cameras is being established in B.C.’s Kootenay region, designed to monitor wildlife trends, such as abundance, and including wolf and grizzly densities. Most of the cameras are initially being established and monitored by provincial staff; however, volunteers are being recruited to “host” cameras.

The solution in Wisconsin is to have volunteers put cameras on wildlife trails for months at a time, allow the devices to photograph animals that move past, then count the number and species of wildlife caught in the lens. The exact location of each camera is confirmed through GPS. Much of the land covered is private, needing the OK of landowners.

That information can then be matched with satellite imagery of habitat type to get an idea of where wildlife are concentrated and across what kind of landscape.

Can hunters and poachers use such specific data to increase the odds of killing wildlife?

“Hunters are some of the stakeholders in the project,” Townsend said. Hunters would have to “work hard” to convert the information into improved hunting results, he said, adding the goal is to use the data for improved hunting quotas and conservation objectives.