Building an open source software infrastructure for conservation - TRAPPER, a web-based application to manage camera trapping projects

Abstract

Ecology and conservation biology have recently become increasingly data intensive, mainly due to technological advances and the growing inter-disciplinary character. However, a data-intensive science needs specific information infrastructure and tools to efficiently manage, integrate, share and (re)use massive amounts of data. An open source software (OSS) is freely available, provides a source code and can be developed in a collaborative public manner. This open and community-based approach can be especially suitable for development of software infrastructure for conservation. The OSS ecosystem is rich and well developed and already existing, stable data management solutions can be easily combined into specific conservation-oriented applications. Moreover, in an information-rich and rapidly changing world, the effectiveness of conservation actions can be substantially improved when all researchers and conservation practitioners have access to the best available software tools at no extra costs. A common OSS infrastructure can help with a standardization of data management in different conservation monitoring programs, which is particularly important since the majority of data collection is still conducted by individual people who are collectively producing large amounts of data. Camera trapping is increasingly becoming an important tool in ecological research and wildlife conservation. However, the organization of large collections of multimedia files, efficient searching for subsets of data and their re-use is a challenging task. This is especially important as camera trapping generates information-rich but often under-utilized datasets (e.g. by-catch data). With proper software infrastructure at hand, data from different camera trapping projects can be harmonized and integrated and used to answer bigger, often globally oriented questions. As a case study, we present TRAPPER, a flexible and open source web application developed to manage, classify, integrate, share and re-use data in camera trapping projects. The main features of TRAPPER are: (i) it is open-source, (ii) it facilitates analysis of videos as well as images, (iii) it provides spatial filtering and web-mapping, (iv) it allows flexible implementation of specific data collection protocols, (v) it is a multi-user and role based system which facilitates collaborative work on camera trapping projects, (vi) it supports data re-use and (re)discovery. TRAPPER can therefore be widely used by ecologists and conservation practitioners working with a variety of camera trap studies, alone or in collaboration with each other.

Bubnicki, J. W., Churski, M., & Kuijper, D. P. J. (2016). TRAPPER: an open source web-based application to manage camera trapping projects. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 7(10), 1209–1216.

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