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

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.

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:

A new study, published in the open-access journal ‘Plos One’ earlier this year, has estimated the distribution and abundance of all UK mammals, the first attempt to do this since the last review in 1995. The study took a ‘systematic modelling approach,’ meaning it overlaid Great Britain with a grid, and for each square, using models, estimated the occurrence and density of each mammal species. No easy task!

To demonstrate the model, let’s take the example of one of the UK’s most abundant mammals: the rabbit.

First, all records of rabbit occurrence are gathered from NBN Gateway (https://nbnatlas.org/) and these are matched with environmental data for those locations. From this we know the type of habitat rabbits seem to like and then we can scale this up to see in every square of Great Britain, ‘how suitable is that habitat for rabbits?’ This is called a ‘habitat suitability map’ and shows us where rabbits are expected to be, even if they have never been surveyed there. The study went further to match up habitat suitability scores with the few reported mammal densities in specific places, and once again by scaling this up predicted the overall abundance for rabbits and all other mammals in Great Britain.

The study yielded some impressive results however the range of some estimates were huge, such as an estimation of between 2 and 225 million rabbits! This is largely down to there not being enough data to put into the models in the first place, so they were unable to give out specific estimates. The study only managed to obtain densities for 53 species in certain locations and quoted:

“In particular this shows a substantial lack of recording for common species such as rabbit, and in areas of low or no density particularly for large mammal species.”

The study also highlighted that data for Northern England was particularly lacking.

So could camera traps help solve this problem?

There is certainly a lot of potential! Camera traps allow us to collect records of many more mammals that we would otherwise rarely see. As well as this, they can be put out in remote locations for long periods of time, something a human observer would never be able to do. They tick the boxes of recording lots of common species, and of course, large mammal species; two of the areas identified in this survey to be data deficient. As well as this, new methods mean that with a specific camera set-up we can estimate density from camera trapping images, a technique that could revolutionise the way we monitor wildlife populations.

With this in mind, particularly as MammalWeb is based largely in North-East England (another data deficient area!), it is more important than ever that people carry on uploading photos to the database, and classifying the species in them! Even if you feel you’re contributing very little, we have such limited data on mammal distributions in the UK that every photo counts, so please keep up the good work!

If you would like to read the article discussed in this post here is the link:

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0176339

Here at MammalWeb, we're working on a project looking at new methods of how mammal abundance could be worked out from camera trapping images alone. Here, I'll talk you through one of the methods we're using!

Distance sampling is a method widely used to estimate animal densities. In the method, an observer will either stand at a point or walk a line transect and record the animals they see, and crucially, the distance from the animal to the observer. The model then works on the basis that animals at larger distances are less likely to be detected than those close-by, and will incorporate this when calculating density.

A neat animation to demonstrate this can be found here:

http://distancesampling.org/whatisds.html

A recently published paper identified how this method could be used with camera traps; the only difference is that the ‘observer’ is a camera, not a human! Of course, it’s not as easy as it sounds because, for every image we get, we need to know how far away the animal is from the camera. For this, we need to set out ‘distance markers’ when setting up the camera. All this means is that, when we set the cameras up, we stand in front of them at 2m distance intervals, and get photos like the ones that follow:

This allows us to mark distances onto all the photos so that, when an animal pops up, we know how far away it is!

That way, we can then use the traditional distance sampling approach to estimate animal abundance.

If you’d like to read more about the method and theory behind it the article can be found here:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/2041-210X.12790/full