R20 camera traps currently less than £60

14-05-2018

Some of our trappers have been impressed by the R20 camera trap. Roland has even done a formal, head-to-head comparison of its performance with that of a much more expensive trap and found them fairly similar.  He notes that they are currently available via Amazon for less than £60.  If anyone gets one, we'd be interested to know how you get on.  Let us know via This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Squirrel face-off

08-05-2018

Roland, a MammalWeb trapper, sent in this photo which seems to capture the native/non-native squirrel conflict rather well!  The photo was taken in southwest Scotland, as part of a squirrel monitoring project with which Roland is involved.  Roland notes that the photo was taken in a wood in which red squirrels are abundant but grey squirrels are actively controlled.  Contact between the species is highly undesirable because of the risk of transmission of squirrel parapox viris, which the grey squirrels carry but are apparently unaffected by.  Red squirrels, by contrast, are highly vulnerable to the disease. There was an outbreak recently near Dumfries, not far from where this image was captured.  

The photo was taken using a Xikezan R20 camera trap, which is one of the cheaper camera traps that Roland has tried out. 

New approach to Spotting

23-04-2018

We have updated our site. The change most likely to affect everyone is the change to the Spotting process. Please note that we no longer ask you to classify every image; instead, we ask you to look through a whole sequence of images and then tell us all the animals you saw. If you are in doubt about how the new approach to Spotting works, please check out the relevant documentation (available via the Learn page). Any other questions, let us know via This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Forthcoming changes: action you need to take!

17-04-2018

In response to your requests, we’re making some changes to the website.  The first of those changes will mainly affect the way that you view and classify images to make the process quicker and more efficient.  That change is scheduled for next Monday, the 23rd of April.

Spotters who classify images after Monday the 23rd should look at our new guide to Spotting.  We are also slightly altering the way that new trapping sites are designated, so that we can expand our national coverage by involving more organisations with some exciting projects; consequently, Trappers should look at our new guide to Trapping.  Both new guides (as well as a document outlining our new approach to projects, and our new privacy policy) are available via the Learn page.

Further exciting updates are planned for coming weeks, and will include changes to allow you to view basic data showing what species you’re finding and where.

In line with new data protection legislation, we will soon be unable to send you emails unless you give us explicit permission to do so.  To ensure that we can continue to communicate with you, to let you know about what we’re finding, and to keep you informed about exciting changes to the website, please subscribe to our newsletter here.

If you have any questions, comments or concerns about the changes, please email us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Bargain camera traps available

Have you thought about being a Trapper but haven't got around to it yet?  One of our existing Trappers has pointed out that there are currently some highly-affordable camera traps available via Amazon.  In particular, there are several camera traps in the £40 - £60 range with excellent customer reviews - e.g., see here.  If you already own one of these traps, or if you do buy one and have thoughts on its performance, let us know.  We can then share that information with other Trappers.  Happy Trapping!

Website modifications coming soon!

As promised further down this page, we have been working on 2 separate kinds of changes to the website.  These are currently being tested and will be introduced over coming weeks.  In the meantime, you might notice some smaller-scale changes to the site, as we test out aspects of the look and feel, in order to align the existing site with the forthcoming modifications.  Please bear with us during this transition phase - and do let us know, via This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., if you have any suggestions or concerns.

Deer Counting at Raby Castle

You may have read, in a previous news post, about a distance sampling method we are trialling here at MammalWeb to try to estimate animal density from camera trap images. In order to test out the accuracy of this method, and some other recently published methods, we’re doing a little test which involves counting lots of deer at Raby Castle.

The aim is to put out some camera traps to get images of the deer and then to use available methods to calculate a deer population density and see how accurate it is. Before we do all this though, the first step is to work out how many deer there are, a task less simple than it sounds!

Although it may not sound all that scientific, the best way to do a thorough count of the deer herd was to take photos of the herd as they followed a tractor which projects tasty carrots! Here are just some of the photographs I got from doing that:

 

After counting dozens of photographs multiple times, I eventually concluded that there are 253 Red deer and 263 Fallow deer at Raby Castle! Now we just need to put out the camera traps and see how close to that figure we can get.

 

New Study on Deerness Woods by Trapper Roland

MammalWeb trapper Roland Ascroft has been camera trapping in his local area of Deerness Woods ever since he borrowed his first camera from us in 2015. Since then, he has contributed a huge number of images to MammalWeb, as well as going even further by conducting his own studies on some of the species in Deerness Woods, such as the Roe Deer. He has been kind enough to write a short article about his experiences as a MammalWeb trapper and some of the findings of his studies! To read the article please click the link below.

Camera Trapping in my Local Woods for MammalWeb

Congratulations to Pen!

A huge congratulations goes to Pen-Yuan Hsing who won the Overall Student Talk Prize at the Ecology Across Borders 2017 Conference held in Ghent, Belgium by the British Ecological Society. Pen gave a talk titled 'Science and citizenship: Capacity building for civic engagement through the MammalWeb citizen science project'  and talked about how in addition to successful crowdsourcing of useful ecological data, MammalWeb has stimulated civic engagement. He talked of examples of this including a group of secondary school students who, with support from the BES, developed their own ecology outreach activities that were presented at public events. He also talked about MammalWeb trappers who started their own camera trapping surveys elsewhere to inform wildlife management, and do their own engagement and outreach. Winning the overall prize is a huge achievement especially considering this year the conference saw a record of 320 entries for talks and posters!

See the official announcement here.

New approach to communications

Many of you will have received an email from us to thank you for your efforts over the past year, and to wish you a Merry Christmas and all the best for 2018.  If you didn't receive that, it's likely that you have changed your email address since you registered with MammalWeb.  If you would like us to update your email address in the database, please let us know by emailing This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

You will also have seen that, on this page, we are posting occasional items that we think will be of interest to many of you.  If you have news items that you would like us to share with the wider MammalWeb community, we would be happy to post them for you.  Please let us know - again, by emailing This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

As many of you will know, this summer we had our celebration event for the official end of our pilot project, generously funded by HLF.  We have been busy since then, and we hope that 2018 will see many new and exciting developments for the platform and for the project as a whole.  We will try to keep you posted on developments, so please look out for the possibility to sign up for our newsletter early in 2018 (and, if we don't have your current email address, please let us know it).

In the meantime, thanks to all our participants.  We hope you have a great Christmas and New Year, and we look forward to developing the project together throughout 2018.  For now, we'll leave you with this lovely roe deer, courtesy of Trapper Stuart: