By Hannah White This blog accompanies the paper: Quantifying large‐scale ecosystem stability with remote sensing data. Read the full paper here We want ecosystems to function. On top of that, we want them to maintain their functioning at a predictable, consistent level. In the face of global change, however, this may be problematic. We need…

By Francisco Javier Ancin-Murguzur This blog accompanies the paper: Drones as a tool to monitor human impacts and vegetation changes in parks and protected areas. Read the full paper here Monitoring trails is an essential part of the conservation work in protected areas to assess how visitors affect the trails and their surroundings. When we…

By Tim O’Brien This blog is an accompaniment to the paper: Camera trapping reveals trends in forest duiker populations in African National Parks. Read the full paper here Presence-absence surveys (more properly detection-nondetection surveys) and occupancy surveys, are often used as indicators of the health of wildlife population. Occupancy surveys use a replicated sampling design where…

by Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research Species are often involved in complex interactions with other species, which can affect their occurrence, abundance, feeding habits and disease transmission. Observing and studying species interactions can be difficult. To circumvent this problem, ecologists increasingly rely on remote devices such as camera traps. In a recent study…

Rasmus Erlandsson Department of Zoology, Stockholm University, Sweden   Some ideas stick in your mind until you do something about them, and in 2011 an idea popped up in my head when I was chatting with a friend on the metro on my way home from university: Are colour infrared aerial photos, one of the…

Merry Crowson Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London, London, UK   “The world is one big data problem.” (Andrew McAfee) There is a lot of excitement in the scientific community surrounding the potential of big data – that is, the recent exponential increase in the amount and variety of data, as well as the…