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.
Human development and roads threaten wildlife through distinct mechanisms and understanding the influence of these elements can better inform mitigation and conservation strategies. We used camera traps to quantify the effects of major roads, environmental factors, and human development on the mammalian community composition between sites north and south of a major interstate highway in northern Utah, USA. We found no significant differences in species richness nor community similarity across the north-south divide of the highway. Through Bayesian hierarchical modeling, we compared the effects of the distance to the highway, housing and human population density, normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), and the human footprint index to changes in mammalian community composition and species-specific habitat usage. Community occupancy response, similarity, and species richness were negatively affected by increased housing and human population densities and positively affected by increased NDVI and decreased human footprint, whereas their response to the highway was more inconclusive. We conclude that mammalian community composition in our study area is influenced by both environmental conditions and human development while the effect of the highway was more nuanced, possibly due to the presence of a newly constructed wildlife overpass. Taken together, the lack of differences in species richness or community composition across the highway suggests that it may not currently exacerbate the effects of other anthropogenic sources of habitat fragmentation and highlights the need for additional research into humanwildlife conflict mitigation strategies. Kelsey A. Barnick and Austin M. Green contributed equally to this work and would like to be considered as co-first authors.
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