Rowcliffe, JM;
Jansen, PA;
Kays, R;
Kranstauber, B;
Carbone, C;
(2016)
Wildlife speed cameras: measuring animal travel speed and day range using camera traps.
Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation
, 2
(2)
pp. 84-94.
10.1002/rse2.17.
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Abstract
Travel speed (average speed of travel while active) and day range (average speed over the daily activity cycle) are behavioural metrics that influence processes including energy use, foraging success, disease transmission and human-wildlife interactions, and which can therefore be applied to a range of questions in ecology and conservation. These metrics are usually derived from telemetry or direct observations. Here, we describe and validate an entirely new alternative approach, using camera traps recording passing animals to measure movement paths at very fine scale. Dividing the length of a passage by its duration gives a speed observation, and average travel speed is estimated by fitting size-biased probability distributions to a sample of speed observations. Day range is then estimated as the product of travel speed and activity level (proportion of time spent active), which can also be estimated from camera-trap data. We field tested the procedure with data from a survey of terrestrial mammals on Barro Colorado Island, Panama. Travel speeds and day ranges estimated for 12 species scaled positively with body mass, and were higher in faunivores than in herbivores, patterns that are consistent with those obtained using independent estimates derived from tracked individuals. Comparisons of our day range estimates with independent telemetry-based estimates for three species also showed very similar values in absolute terms. We conclude that these methods are accurate and ready to use for estimating travel speed and day range in wildlife. Key advantages of the methods are that they are non-invasive, and that measurements are made at very high resolution in time and space, yielding estimates that are comparable across species and studies. Combined with emerging techniques in computer vision, we anticipate that these methods will help to expand the range of species for which we can estimate movement rate in the wild.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Wildlife speed cameras: measuring animal travel speed and day range using camera traps |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1002/rse2.17 |
| Publisher version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/rse2.17 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © 2016 The Authors Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Zoological Society of London. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes. |
| Keywords: | Animal tracking; image analysis; length-biased distributions; movement ecology; travel distance; video capture |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences > Genetics, Evolution and Environment |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1496864 |
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