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

Wisconsin Wildlife Project


Advancing Trail Camera Monitoring Through Simulation

September 2024 - August 2027


Personnel

Participating Agencies

  • Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources

The Snapshot Wisconsin trail camera network provides continuous photo data across Wisconsin to better understand the status of wildlife populations. These data can potentially be used to estimate populations metrics, such as the distributions, sex and age ratios, and relative abundances of both focal game and nongame species. However, Snapshot Wisconsin trail cameras are set up non-randomly and are spaced far apart relative to most home range sizes of Wisconsin’s wildlife. These factors can complicate or impede our ability to get unbiased metrics from existing trail camera modeling methods.

This project is a collaboration between the USGS, the University of Wisconsin - Madison and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. We will build animal movement models to simulate movement of focal species across Wisconsin landscapes with the Snapshot Wisconsin network of trail camera. These simulations will help answer long-standing questions about how the distribution, social structure and population dynamics of animal populations affect our ability to derive accurate population metrics given a distribution of trail cameras.