Conservation and people: Towards an ethical code of conduct for the use of camera traps in wildlife research

Abstract

1. Camera trapping is a widely employed tool in wildlife research, used to estimate animal abundances, understand animal movement, assess species richness and understand animal behaviour. In addition to images of wild animals, research cameras often record human images, inadvertently capturing behaviours ranging from innocuous actions to potentially serious crimes. 2. With the increasing use of camera traps, there is an urgent need to reflect on how researchers should deal with human images caught on cameras. On the one hand, it is important to respect the privacy of individuals caught on cameras, while, on the other hand, there is a larger public duty to report illegal activity. This creates ethical dilemmas for researchers. 3. Here, based on our camera-trap research on snow leopards Panthera uncia, we outline a general code of conduct to help improve the practice of camera trap based research and help researchers better navigate the ethical-legal tightrope of this important research tool. K E Y W O R D S camera trap, code of conduct, ethics, human rights, law, PARTNERS principles for communitybased conservation, privacy, snow leopard 1 INTRODUCTION Camera traps have become important tools for researchers, conservationists, and wildlife managers and are being used to study wildlife and urban ecology (Anton, Hartley, Geldenhuis, & Wittmer, 2018; O'Connell, Nichols, & Karanth, 2011). Camera trapping is especially valuable when research or management involves elusive species living in difficult to access habitats (O'Connell et al., 2011). Camera traps are used to estimate animal abundances, understand animal movement (Borchers, Distiller, Foster, Harmsen, & Milazzo, 2014), assess species This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Understanding the changing role of global public health in biodiversity conservation

“…More recently, the growing use of low-cost drones, in addition to other increasingly affordable sensing technologies, has further fueled suspicions in many communities toward conservation efforts (Sandbrook 2015 ). Similarly, existing efforts to track and monitor wildlife for other reasons have been challenged by communities as invasive (Sandbrook et al 2018 ; Sharma et al 2020 ). Given that existing viral monitoring aims to elicit detailed information regarding rural households, their livelihood activities and potentially illegal use of wildlife (e.g., Smiley Evans et al, 2018 ), it is likely that biosurveillance would exacerbate any existing tensions around privacy and resource use.…”

Principles for the socially responsible use of conservation monitoring technology and data

“…However, with the exception of Sharma et al (2020) on camera traps, no such principles have yet been developed for the particular case of wildlife conservation and we believe they should be, as has been urged for artificial intelligence in conservation (Galaz, 2015;Wearn, Freeman, & Jacoby, 2019). There are manifold ways that data on peoples' spatial and temporal activities-plus their identities-can be collected, aggregated, and rendered into actionable information with or without their knowledge or consent, using what we call here conservation surveillance technologies (CSTs).…”

“…Rather, we do so to differentiate CSTs from other widespread monitoring technologies which cannot collect comparable information about people (e.g., telemetry transmitters) and in order to highlight connections to existing scholarship on surveillance in other contexts. The potential for societal impact exists in at least two circumstances: first, where the intent is to detect, track, and monitor people, and second, where the intent is to observe non-human animals or landscapes but people are incidentally observed as "bycatch" (Sandbrook et al, 2018;Shrestha & Lapeyre, 2018). Issues also arise both "in the field" as traditionally understood, and through online surveillance and big data science as content and location data about social media users is often collected and used without users knowing about it (Toivonen et al, 2019).…”

“…An important exception is the growing literature on “community drones”, which chronicles, analyzes, and promotes grassroots utilization of drones for environmental and social justice (Paneque‐Gálvez, Vargas‐Ramírez, Napoletano, & Cummings, 2017; Radjawali & Pye, 2017; Radjawali, Pye, & Flitner, 2017; Vargas‐Ramírez & Paneque‐Gálvez, 2019). Most recently, Sharma et al (2020) recommended a set of practices for ethical use of camera‐traps. Importantly though, all these studies have been limited to single technologies for field deployment and do not specifically examine their broader implications for conservation practice.…”

“…These principles are based on the authors' collective experience using CSTs for research (Clark et al, 2018), facilitating CST development, studying the ethical issues around CSTs (Adams, 2019; Sandbrook, 2015; Sandbrook et al, 2018) and using user‐generated content to study human‐nature interactions (Di Minin, Tenkanen, & Toivonen, 2015; Hausmann et al, 2018; Toivonen et al, 2019). In contrast to previous studies that have made recommendations for the appropriate use of single technologies (Duffy et al, 2018; Sharma et al, 2020), we aim to provide a “full spectrum” view which can be applied to all existing and new conservation surveillance technologies, from social media posts (Toivonen et al, 2019) to satellites (Lynch, Maslin, Balzter, & Sweeting, 2017). Our intention is to advance a provisional set of empirical but forward looking, constructive, and pragmatic principles for the use of surveillance technologies and their data for conservation.…”