LIST is a Luxembourgish research centre which has developed an innovative method to study and carry out amphibians inventory estimations. The aim of the NEWTRAP project is to develop and make professional camera traps available to observers to make newt population inventories easier.
The use of the NEWTRAP camera trap (Patent LU93388) improves the presence detection of the species while greatly reducing the inventory costs, and increases the feasibility of capture-mark-recapture monitoring (reduction of field efforts), while at the same time improving the quality of the results.
Compared to the methods currently available (for example, funnel traps, environmental DNA), the camera trap allows:
- the species, sex, size and ventral pattern to be determined without any manipulation of the individual subjects: the ventral images are taken in the water;
- the capturing of the individual subjects to be avoided: the camera trap can be left for a number of consecutive days without posing any risk to them;
- the duration of the inventory to be increased for the same fieldwork. Depending on the aims of the study, this means the observations per site can be intensified or the number of sites to be monitored can be increased;
- the temporal resolution of the observations to be increased: the exact passing time of an individual subject is recorded;
- pathogen transfers to be limited: individual subjects are not clustered in a funnel trap for several hours.
HOW IT WORKS
The camera trap is placed in water. The operating time slots can be programmed for every day of the week (for example, every day, every two nights, one day per week...). When an individual subject crosses the camera trap, it triggers the recording of a video sequence stored on a memory card. A web application provides all required resources to manage observation sites and metadata, extract and tag images from video (species, length, sex). The production of video in standardized conditions eases to support the tagging process by machine learning.
Do you want to see some newt videos filmed using our NEWTRAP? Please fill in the form below and follow the link that will appear in the thank you page.
There are 21 questions in the survey and the answers will be treated anonymously. Please note that the three first questions asking you your name, the name of your company as well as your email address are optional and only need to be answered in case you are interested in testing our technology and would like to be contacted in that context (see our related data protection policy)
There are 21 questions in this survey.
