Javier Monzon has been deploying camera traps for close to two decades. He likens retrieving the equipment and the data to opening a present.

“You just don’t know what’s inside until you look,” Monzon, associate professor of biology at Pepperdine University in California, told Mongabay in a video interview.

In 2023, Monzon had an opportunity to be part of a wide-scale camera-trap project, and there was no thinking twice. That year, he led a team that deployed 13 camera traps throughout their university campus in Malibu. Over the course of 45 days, the team gathered more than 22,000 individual images, totaling 147 gigabytes, from a shrubland habitat.

Monzon’s work is part of an annual initiative that aims to collate a data set of camera-trap images of mammal populations from across the U.S. Launched by the Smithsonian Institution and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in 2019, the Snapshot USA project has received data from universities, Native American reservations, and nonprofit organizations, among others, who have volunteered to deploy camera traps for two months every year. “It takes the pulse of the nation’s wildlife using a standardized protocol,” Monzon said.

Earlier this year, the team that runs the project published the data collected over the past five years, which includes more than 890,000 captures of mammals from about 12 million raw images gathered from across the country. “Over time, we can use the data set to look at trends in species diversity, species abundance, and all other kinds of different questions that you can answer with a large quantity of data like this,” Brigit Rooney, survey coordinator at Snapshot USA, told Mongabay in a video interview.

Camera trapping of mammals in the U.S. is done primarily by agencies or university research groups in individual states. This means that, more often than not, the data pertain to specific states and focus on a much smaller group of species. “It seemed like there had to be a way to do something broader,” Bill McShea, wildlife ecologist at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, told Mongabay in a video interview. “There are changes going on that we’re not aware of because we don’t have a big enough picture.”

It was to address this concern that McShea launched the Snapshot USA project with Roland Kays at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. The duo took inspiration from birding surveys that have become popular across the country and enabled researchers to get hold of citizen scientist data. “Standardized surveys like that allowed us to get a handle on how birds are distributed across multiple landscapes,” McShea said. “Nothing like that exists for mammals.”

Since it was kicked off, Snapshot USA’s surveys have taken place in September and October every year. Ahead of the survey, team members provide training to volunteers who have signed up, to ensure that the data they gather is aligned with their quality metrics. Each volunteer is expected to set up an array of at least eight camera traps in the ecosystem they choose to monitor. At the end of the two months, the volunteers upload the data to Wildlife Insights, an AI-driven platform where the images are automatically identified. Once the identifications are corroborated by volunteers, the team at Snapshot USA cleans up the data and prepares it for publication.

In 2024, the project’s biggest year so far, volunteers from across the country set up 190 arrays of camera traps (each array consists of 10 to 20 cameras) and captured 7 million images.

While the team initially published data for individual years, from this year onward it has started putting out multi year data. “If we’re going to do this for a long time, which is the goal, we need to start grouping them since that has more value as a data set,” Rooney said.

The team, McShea said, hopes that scientists and researchers across the board will use the data to formulate region-specific conservation strategies. “You can’t take a study from Wisconsin and use that to explain what’s going on in Florida,” he said. “Only when you get all that data can you see that there are regionally specific responses that are not obvious when you’re looking at a single location or a single landscape.”

Despite the project seeing increased participation over the years, there are still gaps in terms of the locations covered. For example, Rooney said, there’s not a lot of data from the U.S. Midwest. “There are places where you would expect it to be a little empty because there’s perhaps less people using camera traps or the terrain might be difficult,” she said.

The team is now working to fill that gap by spreading the word about the project and recruiting volunteers more widely. The idea is being adapted globally as well. Offshoot projects like Snapshot Europe and Snapshot Japan are already up and running. A similar project is about to launch in Brazil soon, and a Snapshot Pakistan initiative is also in the offing.

“This template and protocol are adaptable,” McShea said. “We need standardized protocols that allow you to compare across ecosystems and landscapes, and Snapshot is a good model for what could be done.”

Banner image: Brown bears captured on camera at the Chilkat State Park in Alaska. Image courtesy of Alaska Department of Fish and Game. 

Abhishyant Kidangoor is a staff writer at Mongabay. Find him on 𝕏 @AbhishyantPK.

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