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Species Richness and Community Dynamics: A Conceptual Framework

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Camera Traps in Animal Ecology

Abstract

The study of animal communities has a long history in many branches of ecology, for instance in community ecology, biogeography and conservation biology. Furthermore, characterizing the size, composition and dynamics of animal communities is also important from a management perspective. For instance, community characteristics such as total size (species richness) or the size of certain subsets (e.g., number of rare or Red listed species) are often used to direct conservation efforts or to monitor their effectiveness. Camera traps can be used to study the size, composition and dynamics of animal communities, especially for large and medium-sized mammals and birds, terrestrial animals and particularly for nocturnal species. Although camera trap data can be treated in much the same way as data from other methods of sampling animal communities, it is particularly suited for capture–recapture-type analyses, given the ease with which discrete capture periods are defined. One important feature of camera-trap data as used for community inference is that the surveyed communities are typically not very large. Hence, the inferential challenges caused by the possible presence of a very large number of very rare or elusive species (Mao and Colwell 2005) are presumably greatly alleviated.

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Acknowledgements

I thank Jim Nichols as well as Bob Dorazio, Andy Royle, Allan O’Connell and Elise Zipkin for very valuable comments to this chapter.

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  1. Swiss Ornithological Institute, 6204, Sempach, Switzerland

    Marc Kéry

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  1. Marc Kéry
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Correspondence to Marc Kéry .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Patuxent Wildlife Research Center–Beltsville Lab, U.S. Geological Survey, 10300 Baltimore Avenue, Beltsville, Maryland, 20705, USA

    Allan F. O’Connell Ph.D. (Research Wildlife Biologist) (Research Wildlife Biologist)

  2. Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, U.S. Geological Survey, 12100 Beech Forest Road, Laurel, Maryland, 20708, USA

    James D. Nichols Ph.D. (Senior Scientist) (Senior Scientist)

  3. Centre for Wildlife Studies, Wildlife Conservation Society, 26-2, Aga Abbas Ali Road (Apt: 403), Bangalore, Karnataka, 560042, India

    K. Ullas Karanth Ph.D. (Senior Conservation Scientist) (Senior Conservation Scientist)

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Kéry, M. (2011). Species Richness and Community Dynamics: A Conceptual Framework. In: O’Connell, A.F., Nichols, J.D., Karanth, K.U. (eds) Camera Traps in Animal Ecology. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-99495-4_12

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