SNAPSHOT USA 2019: a coordinated national camera trap survey of the United States

Abstract

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.

Tracking the decline of weasels in North America

“…We surveyed four data sources for weasel records across North America: furbearer harvest records, museum specimen data (accessed through the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, GBIF; www.gbif.org), citizen science photographic data reported in iNaturalist (iNat, https:// www.inaturalist.org/), and a recent nation-wide standardized trail camera survey conducted in the US (Snapshot USA, [21]).…”

“…We used the 2019 Snapshot USA dataset as a systematic assessment of the present distribution of weasels [21]. This survey consisted of trail cameras deployed at 1509 sites across 110 arrays in all 50 states, for a total of 53,505 trap nights of effort.…”

Review: COVID-19 highlights the importance of camera traps for wildlife conservation research and management

“…Furthermore, eMammal is the host of Snapshot USA (https://emammal. si.edu/snapshot-usa), a nationwide collaboration dedicated to examining trends in mammal communities across a gradient of human influence and climatic conditions (Cove et al, 2021). Snapshot USA was active for the 2020 field season, even under COVID-19 restrictions.…”

Eastern red-backed salamanders: A comprehensive review of an undervalued model in evolution, ecology, & behavior

“…Beginning in the late 20th century with the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) network (Hobbie et al, 2003), there has been a steady proliferation of CDEs in the early decades of the 21st century. While coming up with an exhaustive list of these CDEs is beyond the scope of our paper, we note for example, that the faculty authors of this paper belong to EREN (The Ecological Research as Education Network; Gartner et al, 2020), Snapshot USA (Cove et al, 2021), and SPARCnet (Sutherland et al, 2016;Munoz et al, 2016b;Hernandez-Pacheco et al, 2019), and we have used SquirrelNet (Dizney et al, 2020), LTER, and NEON (National Ecological Observatory Network; Keller et al, 2008) data in both our teaching and research.…”