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Phinda Camera Trap Survey 2024
The Phinda Camera Trap Survey 2024 is nearly over! Every two years, from April to August, the team at Phinda investigate if there have been any changes with the species on the reserve, and recently the ACE volunteers have been busy assisting them. This survey helps the Phinda team understand population numbers, especially for the more elusive or nocturnal species such as leopards, hyenas, honey badgers, servals, polecats and bushpigs. In fact, the camera trap survey helped them identify that Phinda would be a suitable release area for pangolins and the reserve is now part of the Pangolin Reintroduction Project!
Charli De Vos, the Research Technician and Ecologist at Phinda, is responsible for the camera trap survey. The survey is done over two consecutive periods of 45 days each - the first period takes place in the north of the Munywana Conservancy and the second in the south, documenting 90 days in total.
ACE volunteers supported Charli in setting up the camera traps and the collection of the camera SD cards. This is a lot of work as there are 208 cameras in total! Two cameras are present at each site, meaning 104 locations. This is so the team can view the animal from both sides, which is crucial for developing animal ID kits, especially if the animals have different markings on each side (such as the spotted coats on leopards and servals). This is because the markings are unique to each animal and act as a ‘fingerprint’ to help identify them. Phinda then use a program called African Carnivore Wildbooks to build these ID kits and with 208 cameras it means that, on average, each camera trap survey produces 120,000 images!
The cameras work on motion sensors. So things like grass moving in the wind could trigger the camera to take a photo, which depletes the battery life and fills up the SD cards with irrelevant information.
Once the camera traps are set up, they are interfered with as little as possible. This is because human disturbance at the camera trap sites needs to be limited, as it could cause animals to avoid or become more interested in the cameras, which would mean the data being recorded wouldn’t be as accurate.
At the halfway point, Charli and the volunteers check the condition of the cameras including the battery levels, replace the SD cards so there is more room for photos, and clear more vegetation if necessary.
We don’t do this survey every year as we found it didn’t give much variability in the data, so now we complete it every two years.
The data from the camera traps are uploaded to a program called TrapTagger which groups the photos by species. This helps the Phinda team understand:
- Which species are present
- The total number of photos per species
- The total number of times the species was photographed
- The total number of camera sites each species visited
And this helps them to understand density estimates! This means Phinda can investigate why there might be changes in population numbers over the different years, and compare this with additional data such as rainfall patterns, with the aim of understanding cause and effect. It also provides a brilliant method of data collection for species that aren’t seen as often when doing general wildlife surveys, so Phinda can provide management solutions specific to those species, such as pangolins and the Pangolin Reintroduction Project.
What’s the future of the camera trap survey?
The Phinda Camera Trap Survey not only supports the reserve but also external organisations and research. The project is done in collaboration with Dr. Laura Gigliotti from the USA and Dr. Gonçalo Curveira-Santos from Portugal. They have both published numerous papers on the data collected and under their guidance and the reserves’ needs - the project is ever-expanding.
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