Abstract:

During the last two decades, infrared-triggered camera-trapping has been widely used in wildlife and biodiversity research and conservation. In the areas of wildlife ecology research, animal species inventory, biodiversity monitoring and protected area management in China, considerable outputs have been produced by scientific research and conservation applications based on camera-trapping. This technique has been successfully used to detect rare or elusive species, conduct biodiversity inventory, study animal behavior, estimate population parameters, and evaluate the effectiveness of protected area management. Along with the rapid development of modern ecological analysis and modeling tools, camera-trapping will play a more important role in wildlife research at various levels. Meanwhile, along with improvements in techniques, decreasing cost and increasing application interests, camera-trapping will be adopted by more researchers, wildlife managers and protected areas, and can be used for systematic wildlife monitoring using standard protocols. Efforts devoted to its future development and applications should focus on establishing systematically-designed monitoring networks and data-sharing protocols, and developing new analytical approaches and statistical models specifically based on camera-trapping data.

Key words: camera-trapping, wildlife ecology, monitoring index, population parameter, ecological modeling