Wildlife Insights: streamlining the analysis of camera-trap data to preserve biodiversity

Webinario Data Latam Enero 2021

Camera traps, digital cameras that automatically record pictures or videos when heat- and motion-triggered, are nowadays widely used by ecologists and wildlife managers to collect information about the distribution, abundance, and behavior of wildlife species. Every year, millions of images are collected in any region of the world, but the time and skills required to process and analyze this data hinder their use as guidance for establishing conservation and management policy to protect biodiversity at local and global scale. Wildlife Insights (WI) is a new web platform that aims at supporting camera-trappers around the world by facilitating species identification, management, and analysis of data collected using camera traps. The analytical infrastructure within WI allows users to produce and visualize results from their camera-trap data through an easily-accessible GUI interface. In the background, the analyses are performed in R, leveraging several R packages commonly used for the analysis of camera-trap data. The results and plots produced can help improve data quality, be directly used on reports, as a guide for policymakers, or can provide a base for future analysis.

The talk will be given by Fabiola Iannarilli, a wildlife ecologist with a strong interest in quantitative statistics. She currently works as a Postdoctoral Associate in the Center for Biodiversity and Global Change at Yale University. Her research focuses on how improving the use of camera traps and the analysis of camera-trap data can inform the conservation and management of wildlife species. Fabiola earned her PhD in Conservation Sciences from the University of Minnesota working on camera-trap sampling designs for monitoring occurrence of multiple species of carnivores. She got an MS in Eco-Biology and a BS in Biology at the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy.