Safari tourist captures could produce useful conservation data

Conservation efforts need data. To understand how a species is, it is essential to have information on the approximate number of members of this species and their place of residence.

But this type of information is extremely complicated and expensive to obtain. Wilderness areas cover large tracts of land, many of which may be difficult or impossible to access. Methods of estimating population density rely on expensive equipment and working time, and conservation is hopelessly underfunded.

A paper in Current biology this week offers a cheap alternative that could work in some contexts: tourist photos. The researchers found that data collected from tourist images in Botswana provided results comparable to those of more traditional survey methods – and at a much lower cost.

Data there for taking

In conservation areas very frequented by tourists, large groups of people are daily on the ground, searching for and recording the presence of animals. The main author, Kasim Rafiq, realized the amount of useful information collected during these trips when the safari guides told him that they had seen a leopard at a ear named Pavarotti this very morning. Rafiq had been trying to find Pavarotti for months.

So Rafiq and his colleagues have come up with a way to recover this data. They approached groups of tourists staying in a safari lodge in Botswana and asked them if they would be interested in contributing their pictures of large carnivores (lions, leopards, wild dogs, cheetahs and spotted hyenas) to the project. Of the 26 groups contacted, all members were in agreement, suggesting that interest in this type of work would likely be high.

The group members received GPS recorders that would record the location of the tour groups on their safaris, which could last up to four or five hours. The GPS logs would then be matched with the time-stamped photos of the tourists' cameras collected at the end of their stay.

The researchers found an ingenious way to deal with the problem that no camera timestamp is ever correct: tourists were asked to photograph a computer screen displaying the time exact, which was then used to correct the camera timestamp in the data.

Overlay of estimates

Rafiq and his colleagues identified the individual animals on the tourist photos with the help of physical markings and then used the data to extrapolate estimates of population density (number of individuals living within 100 km²).

The researchers then compared these results to the estimates they calculated using three more traditional survey methods: photographic traps, emission tracking, and calls, which attract animals by playing noises with a high loudspeaker.

The different methods have all produced different ranges of estimates of population density, but it is important to note that the ranges of estimates of tourist photos overlap with those of traditional methods, suggesting that the Tourist photo results were comparable. For cheetahs, the tourism method was the only one able to identify that cheetahs lived in the study area – although there are not enough people to calculate a density estimate.

Obviously, mbad-generated data of this type is much less expensive than other methods based on research by researchers. It was only slightly cheaper than the Spoor survey method, but it cost less than half of the call method and a quarter of the least expensive estimate for camera trapping (an estimate baduming possibility to reuse previously purchased photo material).

Good for lions, but probably not snakes

A potential concern with the tourism method is that safari guides may have a good idea of ​​the preferred places for certain species, and thus be able to find these places reliably. This would mean that populations are more densely populated at the location sampled by scientific citizens, compared to other places in the study area.

This is a problem because the methods that produce the density estimate badume that a site is representative of the entire study area. The place where the animals were found is therefore supposed to be medium and not extra dense. Rafiq and his colleagues have made some adjustments to reflect this, but the researchers point to this as a potential weakness of this method.

Then there is the obvious limitation that tourists generally interest mainly, or exclusively, the charismatic megafauna. Lions have a lot of love; less exciting species, not so much. But all methods have their limits. Tourist cameras are just one more tool available for environmental advocates – and their use to study some species could free up resources to focus efforts elsewhere.

It would also be possible to further reduce the search costs of this method by automating some parts of the data sorting process, notes Rafiq in The Conversation: "If the efforts of the tourists were badociated with an AI that could quickly process millions of dollars. In pictures, ecologists might have a simple and inexpensive method to monitor wildlife. "

Current biology, 2018. DOI: 10.1016 / j.cub.2019.05.056 (About DOIs).