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…

  Julie A. Fortin School of Environmental Studies, University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada   Beginning over a hundred years ago, the Canadian government hired land surveyors to map out the mountains of western Canada. These surveyors used unique photo-topographic methods to create topographic maps . As a byproduct of their work, there are…

Evelyn Piña‐Covarrubias, Andrew P. Hill, Peter Prince, Jake L. Snaddon, Alex Rogers, C. Patrick Doncaster, 2018, Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation, https://doi.org/10.1002/rse2.97  The rapid evolution in miniaturisation, power efficiency and affordability of acoustic sensors, combined with new innovations in smart capability, are vastly expanding opportunities in ground‐level monitoring for wildlife conservation at a regional scale,…

Alison Beresford RSPB Centre for Conservation Science, Edinburgh, United Kingdom   Every autumn, millions of Afro-palearctic migratory birds make the long journey from their breeding grounds in Europe to wintering grounds in sub-Saharan Africa, returning north again in the spring.  Over the last 50 years, the European breeding populations of many of these species have…

Pen-Yuan Hsing and Philip Stephens, Conservation Ecology Group, Department of Biosciences, Durham University, Durham, United Kingdom DH1 3LE (@MammalWeb) This blog post is shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. You can read the full research paper here. To conserve biodiversity effectively, we need to know where and in what abundance it occurs. Breeding bird…

Caitlin Jacobs Idaho Department of Fish and Game, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, USA   Camera traps are a powerful research tool that is becoming increasingly important in the field of wildlife biology. Researchers all over the world use camera traps to assess a wide range of ecological questions, such as wildlife distribution, composition, abundance, density, population trends…