Calgary Captured: the nuts and bolts of our wildlife monitoring program

Here at The City, we’re always looking for more information about our wild neighbours and how they’re making use of space in Calgary. To find out more, Calgary Parks installed remote wildlife cameras across the city’s natural areas to give us a peek into which species are using our parks, and how they move around within them.

The project, Calgary Captured, is collecting valuable, never before documented data, which will help to inform conservation and management decisions about our open spaces. And, we're analyzing the data by opening up the photos to the public to help us classify. 

With help from Calgarians like you, here are some of the questions we’ll be exploring over the next few years:

• Which species are in Calgary’s parks system?
• How do human activities impact wildlife movement in parks? (Are species temporally displaced from trails?)
• Is the corridor modeling done for Calgary valid?
• What are the long term trends and patterns of terrestrial mammals in Calgary?

Managing the cameras and imaging to answer these questions is quite an undertaking. The final product is what you’ll you see up on Zooniverse, which is the culmination of hundreds of hours of work.

Can you identify what kind of animal we caught on camera?

Here’s a breakdown of how it all comes together:

The cameras, fitted with built-in solar powered batteries and strapped to trees, trigger an image to be captured at each movement.

Duck, duck, or goose?

The cameras are positioned to best capture medium to large sized terrestrial mammal species such as coyote, deer and bobcat. However, birds, insects, small rodents and even grass waving in the wind are sometimes photographed. Each month, thousands of images are recorded on each of the memory cards of over 60 cameras located throughout Calgary’s natural areas. Consistent management of these cameras results in dozens of hours spent in the field to swap out all memory cards (every three weeks) and ensure the cameras continue to function properly. Systematic collection of the camera’s memory cards year-round are key to building a robust dataset. Extreme weather, which Calgary is no stranger to, can cause batteries to deplete if triggered by falling snow or branches violently waving during a storm, and can, at times, cause cameras to malfunction at very low temperatures.

Once memory cards are collected, the images are organized and processed in an internal database, and are then prepared for upload to the Calgary Captured Zooniverse portal.

We bearly caught a snap of this furry friend on camera.

One of the most time-consuming tasks is manually screening for humans that are captured using the

parks. This information gives us valuable insight into human-wildlife coexistence, and how wildlife respond to peak human use periods; but to protect privacy, any images of Calgarians captured on camera are classified on the internal database and deleted to avoid upload to the public Zooniverse site. That’s no easy task when you consider how many Calgarians use city parks!

Thanks to dedicated citizen scientists like yourselves thousands of wildlife images have been classified and our understanding of who is making use of our natural areas is becoming clearer every day.

You can see initial results from Season 1 (May to August 2017) on the Zooniverse site, and we'll be posting more information as it becomes available.

Who's who in the Calgary Captured zoo?

Interested in participating? We currently have Season 2 (September 2017 – February 2018) available to classify on the Zooniverse site - get started now!