Abstract
Information from camera traps is used for inferences on species presence, richness, abundance, demography, and activity. Camera trap placement design is likely to influence these parameter estimates. Herein we simultaneously generate and compare estimates obtained from camera traps (a) placed to optimize large carnivore captures and (b) random placement, to infer accuracy and biases for parameter estimates. Both setups recorded 25 species when same number of trail and random cameras (n = 31) were compared. However, species accumulation rate was faster with trail cameras. Relative abundance indices (RAI) from random cameras surrogated abundance estimated from capture-mark-recapture and distance sampling, while RAI were biased higher for carnivores from trail cameras. Group size of wild-ungulates obtained from both camera setups were comparable. Random cameras detected nocturnal activities of wild ungulates in contrast to mostly diurnal activities observed from trail cameras. Our results show that trail and random camera setup give similar estimates of species richness and group size, but differ for estimates of relative abundance and activity patterns. Therefore, inferences made from each of these camera trap designs on the above parameters need to be viewed within this context.
Highlights
Information from camera traps is used for inferences on species presence, richness, abundance, demography, and activity
A total number of 32 species were photo-captured in trail cameras (n = 106), and 25 species were photo-captured in random cameras (n = 31) (Table 1)
Both random and paired trail cameras (n = 31, trail cameras placed in the proximity of random cameras) detected 25 species, out of which 23 were common for both setups (Supplementary Table 1)
Summary
Information from camera traps is used for inferences on species presence, richness, abundance, demography, and activity. A typical capture-recapture study is designed to maximize detections of the target species and is essentially non-random and often not systematic[18] Such camera trap designs generate secondary data on several non-target species which are often used to infer their relative abundance indices[19,20,21], activity patterns[22,23], and occupancy e stimates[24]. We calculated density estimates of ungulates from distance sampling and of tiger and leopards from spatially explicit capture-mark-recapture and regressed them against RAI values obtained from trail and random cameras This experimental setup permits us to test if camera trap placement is an important aspect to be considered for estimating species richness, abundance, and activity
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