Wisconsin Trailcam Project Launch

If you count yourself among the American big game hunters who have discovered the value of remote wildlife cameras for scouting, documentation, hunt preparation and wildlife management, you’re certainly part of a growing contingent of sportsmen and women. You know how a few strategically placed units throughout your property can teach you a lot about your land – and its wildlife – things that you never knew before these phenomenal outdoor tools were available.

Well, what if the concept of trailcam use were tailored on a much larger scale, like the private wild lands of an entire state?

Well, that’s the ambitious goal of cooperating groups and individuals in Wisconsin, who have just launched an unprecedented project to record and document the state’s wildlife by distributing and deploying some 5,000 trail cameras, all connected by a suite of remote-sensing satellites and a global crowd-sourced database.

Up until now, there’s never been anything to compare with the size and scope of Snapshot Wisconsin, a collaboration of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR), NASA and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The project, which was launched last week, has already seen 500 cameras deployed, mostly in Iowa and Sawyer counties, the first two counties in the state to sign on to the Snapshot Wisconsin initiative. Several hundred more will be deployed in the coming months and more added over time as other Wisconsin counties become part of the project.

“Something like this has never been done before, not for such a large area,” said UW-Madison Professor of Forest and Wildlife Ecology Phil Townsend, one of the leaders of the project. “The number of trailcams and the spatial scale we’re working on will make this project unique.”

In particular, the DNR plans to use Snapshot Wisconsin data to help inform county deer advisory councils on deer and their predators. It will supplement existing programs that now monitor and estimate population sizes for different species. If successful, the project might reduce the need for other more expensive types of wildlife monitoring. For example, the DNR now measures wildlife species like coyotes and deer using airplanes over parts of the state.

From a scientific perspective, says Townsend, the project will give researchers the ability to model Wisconsin’s wildlife populations in ways previously unimagined.

“This will be dynamic,” Townsend said. “We’ll see how things change from one season to the next.”

The Snapshot Wisconsin initiative, funded largely by the Wisconsin DNR and NASA, promises a far more comprehensive survey of Wisconsin wildlife than currently exists. Deer and predator surveys, for example, now tend to be limited to a few locales. Snapshot Wisconsin, explains Townsend, changes the game completely as trailcams with GPS locations will be deployed by volunteers statewide.

The images captured by the thousands of trailcams will be reconciled with images and data from NASA’s Terra, Aqua and Landsat satellites. The GPS locations from the remote units will let researchers sync data from any particular trailcam with satellite images of the landscape. The satellite perspective, according to Townsend, gives researchers the ability to fuse camera data with remotely-sensed data on ecosystems, habitat and land use types, such as agricultural and urban development.

Sounds exciting, doesn’t it?

The Wisconsin DNR is starting to recruit volunteer citizen scientists who are trained by UW-Extension to operate and maintain the motion-activated camera traps. The agency plans to roll out the program gradually, county by county, to improve the process for volunteers and assess the program’s effectiveness.

Anyone interested in hosting a camera on their property can get more information on the Snapshot Wisconsin online signup site