Are we telling the same story? Comparing inferences made from camera trap and telemetry data for wildlife monitoring

Abstract

Estimating habitat and spatial associations for wildlife is common across ecological studies and it is well known that individual traits can drive population dynamics and vice versa. Thus, it is commonly assumed that individual‐ and population‐level data should represent the same underlying processes, but few studies have directly compared contemporaneous data representing these different perspectives. We evaluated the circumstances under which data collected from Lagrangian (individual‐level) and Eulerian (population‐level) perspectives could yield comparable inference to understand how scalable information is from the individual to the population. We used Global Positioning System (GPS) collar (Lagrangian) and camera trap (Eulerian) data for seven species collected simultaneously in eastern Washington (2018–2020) to compare inferences made from different survey perspectives. We fit the respective data streams to resource selection functions (RSFs) and occupancy models and compared estimated habitat‐ and space‐use patterns for each species. Although previous studies have considered whether individual‐ and population‐level data generated comparable information, ours is the first to make this comparison for multiple species simultaneously and to specifically ask whether inferences from the two perspectives differed depending on the focal species. We found general agreement between the predicted spatial distributions for most paired analyses, although specific habitat relationships differed. We hypothesize the discrepancies arose due to differences in statistical power associated with camera and GPS‐collar sampling, as well as spatial mismatches in the data. Our research suggests data collected from individual‐based sampling methods can capture coarse population‐wide patterns for a diversity of species, but results differ when interpreting specific wildlife‐habitat relationships.

Density‐dependent habitat selection alters drivers of population distribution in northern Yellowstone elk

“…Individual behaviour scales up to population‐level distributions (Mueller & Fagan, 2008 ), so results from the two perspectives can, in principle, be reconciled. In practice, few studies have compared the Eulerian and Lagrangian approaches to studying population‐level space use (but see Phillips et al, 2019 ; Bassing et al, 2022 ). In our case, we find both similarities and discrepancies between our work (Eulerian) and previous studies (Lagrangian) of elk habitat selection in northern Yellowstone (Appendix S7 ).…”

Wildlife whodunnit: forensic identification of predators to inform wildlife management and conservation

“…White‐tailed deer fawns were fitted with expandable, very high frequency (VHF) radio collars at capture (Model M4210, Advanced Telemetry Systems, Isanti, MN, USA and Model Vertex Natal‐linked, Vectronic Aerospace, Berlin, Germany). We captured neonatal elk opportunistically and by targeting VIT expulsions from collared adult female elk (Bassing et al 2022). Adult elk were not included in our study as none were confirmed to die by predation.…”

Comparing wildlife habitat suitability models based on expert opinion with camera trap detections

“…Further studies should also consider other ways of validating expert models. Other potential sources of validation data could come from GPS or other tracking devices that might show direct relationships with animal habitat selection (Bassing et al., 2023). We recommend validating expert models either with camera surveys explicitly designed to sample across a range of predicted values or with movement data from animal tracking.…”