With the accelerating pace of global change, it is imperative that we obtain rapid inventories of the status and distribution of wildlife for ecological inferences and conservation planning. To address this challenge, we launched the SNAPSHOT USA project, a collaborative survey of terrestrial wildlife populations using camera traps across the United States. For our first annual survey, we compiled data across all 50 states during a 14‐week period (17 August–24 November of 2019). We sampled wildlife at 1,509 camera trap sites from 110 camera trap arrays covering 12 different ecoregions across four development zones. This effort resulted in 166,036 unique detections of 83 species of mammals and 17 species of birds. All images were processed through the Smithsonian’s eMammal camera trap data repository and included an expert review phase to ensure taxonomic accuracy of data, resulting in each picture being reviewed at least twice. The results represent a timely and standardized camera trap survey of the United States. All of the 2019 survey data are made available herein. We are currently repeating surveys in fall 2020, opening up the opportunity to other institutions and cooperators to expand coverage of all the urban–wild gradients and ecophysiographic regions of the country. Future data will be available as the database is updated at eMammal.si.edu/snapshot‐usa, as will future data paper submissions. These data will be useful for local and macroecological research including the examination of community assembly, effects of environmental and anthropogenic landscape variables, effects of fragmentation and extinction debt dynamics, as well as species‐specific population dynamics and conservation action plans. There are no copyright restrictions; please cite this paper when using the data for publication.

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Our premise was to understand the basic structure of the flower-flower visitor community at La Mancha in Veracruz, Mexico. We used network analyses to study the structure of this community. In particular, to analyze, (1) if flower color and shape (“as a limited portion of the traditional floral syndromes definition”) were linked to the arrival of certain floral visitors, (2) if visits to flowers were generalist, specific and/or modular; and (3) which plant species, if any, in the core of the network could affect the stability of floral visitors. In order to analyze the organization of the plant-floral visitor community, we prepared network graphics using Pajek, nestedness (as NODF) with Aninhado, and modularity with the SA algorithm. The network obtained was nested suggesting that generalist species (with the most associations) were interacting with specialists (with fewer associations). Furthermore, floral visitors (Hymenoptera, Diptera, Lepidoptera and Trochiilidae) did not exhibit a particular preference for a specific flower color or shape, each pollinator group visited most flowers/colors/shapes considered. The same was similar for all 14 resulting modules. As in other studies, we suggest that pollination leans to generalization rather than to specialization. We suggest that maybe seasonality/food resource could be the factors to analyze as the next step in floral visits which may be the answer to modularity in this seasonal ecosystem.

As ecosystems face disruption of community dynamics and habitat loss, the idea of determining ahead of time which species can become extinct is an important subject in conservation biology. A species’ vulnerability to extinction is dependent upon both intrinsic (life-history strategies, genetics) and extrinsic factors (environment, anthropogenic threats). Studies linking intrinsic traits to extinction risk have shown variable results, and to our knowledge, there has not been a systematic analysis looking at how demographic patterns in stage-specific survival and reproductive rates correlate to extinction risk. We used matrix projection models from the COMPADRE and COMADRE matrix databases and IUCN Red List status as our proxy of extinction risk to investigate if some demographic patterns are more vulnerable to extinction than others. We obtained data on demographic rates, phylogeny, and IUCN status for 159 species of herbaceous plants, trees, mammals, and birds. We calculated 14 demographic metrics related to different aspects of life history and elasticity values and analyzed whether they differ based on IUCN categories using conditional random forest analysis and phylogenetic generalized least square regressions. We mapped all species within the database, both with IUCN assessment and without, and overlaid them with biodiversity hotspots to investigate if there is bias within the assessed species and how many of the non-assessed species could use the demographic information recorded in COMPADRE and COMADRE for future IUCN assessments. We found that herbaceous perennials are more vulnerable when they mature early and have high juvenile survival rates; birds are more vulnerable with high progressive growth and reproduction; mammals are more vulnerable when they have longer generation times. These patterns may be used to assess relative vulnerability across species when lacking abundance or trend data.