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

Remote cameras, which can take photos on sequential or time-lapse schedules, or via activation of an infrared trigger, are now used in a wide array of research and monitoring programs and they generate vast volumes of data. In order to use animal data from these photos to estimate occupancy or abundance, an efficient process is needed that uses machine learning (ML) techniques to extract species identification and accounts for classification error. The project is a collaboration with mammal researchers of Colorado Parks and Wildlife. The ML model and workflow developed will be used to build models to assess species distribution and population dynamics, by researchers as well as managers for different species.