Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units Program: Arkansas
Education, Research and Technical Assistance for Managing Our Natural Resources

As the country undergoes rapid development and alteration to accommodate our growing human population, it becomes ever more important to have baseline data regarding wildlife populations and distribution so we can identify how our actions affect wildlife. Snapshot USA's goal is to facilitate the collaboration of cooperators to contribute to a national database of public wildlife data. This nationwide data will be used to examine nationwide trends in mammal community assembly rules associated with natural environmental and anthropogenic filters. Collaborators for all 50 states will contribute camera trap data from a standardized camera trap array at the same time from each site and the Smithsonian Institute will compile and lead efforts to analyze data. The Arkansas Cooperative Research Unit is contributing data from Arkansas collected at Woolsey Wet Prairie Reserve. To date, we have collected and contributed over 80,000 photos from this urban reserve. Data provided should provide information regarding the occupancy of mesopredators, activity patterns of animals across the country and between habitats, and relatively density of several common species of mammals. This effort will expand in coming years to include additional habitats and countries. This database will be one of the largest camera trap image repositories in existence and will provide the raw material for numerous large-scale ecological examinations of mammal populations.