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Camera trap data

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Peter Desmet edited this page Jun 2, 2023 · 5 revisions

By Peter Desmet (INBO)

Use case

Camera trap data formatted as a Camtrap DP.

Darwin Core recommendation

Deployments (of camera traps) are parent events, with observations (machine observations) as child events. No information about the parent event is provided other than its ID, meaning that data can be expressed in an Occurrence Core with one row per observation and parentEventID shared by all occurrences in a deployment. Sequence-based observations share an eventID per sequence, image-based observations share an eventID per image. The image(s) an observation is based on are provided in the Audubon Media Description extension, with a foreign key to the observation. Excluded are records that document blank or unclassified media, vehicles and observations of humans.

Implementation

We recommend using the "camtraptor" R package, which was developed in collaboration with John Wieczorek and GBIF. Its write_dwc() function automatically transforms a Camtrap DP to Darwin Core. A write_eml() function is also available.

Example

MICA - Muskrat and coypu camera trap observations in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany is a camera trap dataset published by the Research Institute for Nature and Forest (INBO). The original dataset contains over 1k deployments, 2.5M media and 129k observations (many not of animals).

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