I like to involve non-professionals in the monitoring of wildlife to make this monitoring more inclusive and accessible. Most of my projects involve the use of camera traps, cameras with a passive-infrared sensor that take pictures when they detect a moving difference in temperature (mostly a warm-blooded animal), but I am increasingly using other techniques such as acoustic sensors. By involving non-professionals, I hope to bring people in contact with nature and give them a unique experience, shaping their perceptions towards nature and science. I collaborate with social scientists to study these potential effects.
The number of people using camera traps to study wildlife is increasing tremendously. Since my PhD, I have been involved in the development of camera trapping methods, from the simplification of the estimation of the effective detection distance of camera traps, to the development of a framework for detection of animals by camera traps.
Below, you can find some information on several of the past and ongoing projects within this research line.
Scandcam
Scandcam is a collaboration between SLU, the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research (www.nina.no), the Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences (INN) and several Swedish County Administrative boards. The aim of the project is to use camera traps to study and monitor Scandinavian wildlife with a focus on lynx, ungulates and small game species. The project started in Norway, where we now have a permanent monitoring grid with several hundreds of cameras. You can check out the images recorded by our cameras at viltkamera.nina.no.
Collared lynx in Southern Norway caught by a camera trap. Copyright: NINA
I am the project leader for Scandcam in Sweden and leading an effort to set-up several permanent camera-trapping grids in Sweden. Part of that work is in close collaboration with employees at two SITES (Swedish Infrastructure for Ecological Science) stations, Grimsö and Svartberget.
Viltbild
Viltbild is a collaboration with the Swedish Association for Hunting and Wildlife Management (sv: Svenska Jägareförbundet) in which we are developing a platform to collect camera-trapping images taken by the thousands of cameras that hunters are using all over Sweden. Long-term we hope to use this platform as a digital monitoring tool to monitor Swedish game species with the help of hunters.
Meet your wild neighbours
In meet your wild neighbours, we invited all inhabitants of Umeå municipality in northern Sweden to borrow a camera trap for a month and put it up in their surroundings. In this way, they helped us getting a better understanding of how urbanisation shapes mammal communities at this high latitude. This project was a collaboration with dr Roland Kays at North Carolina Museum for Natural Science and NC State University and follows the same protocol as the NC Candid Critters project.
