スミソニアン国立動物園さんのインスタグラム写真 - (スミソニアン国立動物園Instagram)「How do you study something as vast and diverse as the #AmericanPrairie? With📷 camera traps! We know that animals select where to live based on their needs — such as food, shelter or safe passage — and their preferences change throughout the year. Understanding how human activity affects wildlife is important for land managers, because once we understand the problems we can think of ways to mitigate and manage them. Learning how animals interact — whether as predator and prey, or as species competing for the same resources — is also key. Animals have routines. Some species are diurnal (active during the day), others are nocturnal (active during dark hours) and some are crepuscular (active at dusk and dawn). What we need is a method that can capture mammal activity at all hours of the day and for a few weeks at a time. That’s where camera traps come in. A camera trap is a small device triggered by a motion detector. Every time something that omits a heat signature (like a mule deer or an elk) moves in front of the camera, it snaps a picture. And a picture can tell us a lot about an animal — like its age and sex, what time of day it visits a specific place and whether it travels alone or with a group. Camera traps help us study mammals continuously for long periods of time. They have the added benefit of working while we’re not in the field, with minimum disturbance to wildlife. They also help answer the questions. Does human activity impact how a mammal spends its time? Does an animal’s circadian rhythm (the internal clock that regulates when it sleeps and wakes) change in response to changes in land use? In the forest we can easily mount cameras on trees, but in the grasslands it’s a bit trickier. Some animals are attracted to foreign objects that stick out, so we try to keep the cameras low to the ground. We even camouflage them so wildlife doesn’t get too curious. The data we collect will tell us how habitat selection, seasonality and grazing management affects wildlife, as well as how different animals impact each other. #Montana #Pronghorn #CameraTrap #Ecology #Prairie #Grasslands」8月14日 22時30分