biodiversity monitoring and wildlife occupancy at the center
In Collaboration with Dr. Maria Silveira and the LTAR Project
The overall objective of this research is to monitor biodiversity and determine wildlife species that occupy the native habitat (oak hammocks, rangelands, wetlands and planted pines) at the center. We deployed 96 game cameras across the native habitat using a stratified random design. These game cameras are “no-glow” so they use an infrared light at night that will not glow and startle wildlife. We hope to use software and statistical programs R and Digicam with AI (artificial intelligence) to process and identify wildlife species in imagery data. Cameras will be checked monthly for data collection and battery replacement. In addition, we are deploying 8-16 acoustic recording devices that will record all wildlife sounds. The acoustic recorders will run continuously and be checked about every 20 days for data download and battery replacement. Using the software Kaleidoscope we will perform cluster analyses and use various resources to identify wildlife sounds by species. We hope this data will help us identify the type of wildlife occurring across the center’s native habitats, and relate this data to habitat type, and environmental variables collected from the LTAR project, such as vegetation diversity or disturbance.