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Entry 010 — Glossary
Glossary
- Camera trap
- A motion- or time-triggered camera left in the field to record animals.
- Deployment
- One camera at one location for one period, with its settings. The basic unit in Camtrap DP.
- Detection
- A model or person marking that something (an animal, person or vehicle) is visible in a file.
- Blank
- A camera-trap file with no animal in it, often triggered by vegetation, light or weather.
- Sequence (burst)
- A group of images taken in quick succession after one trigger, often labelled together.
- Occurrence
- A record that a species was present at a place and time; the core record type in Darwin Core and GBIF.
- Darwin Core
- The standard vocabulary for sharing biodiversity occurrence data, maintained by TDWG.
- Camtrap DP
- Camera Trap Data Package: an exchange format with deployments, media and observations tables plus metadata.
- FAIR
- Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable: principles for data that others can find and build on.
- Generalisation
- Deliberately reducing the precision of a shared location (for example, of a sensitive species) and documenting that it was done.
- QA/QC
- Quality assurance and quality control: checks that catch errors in data handling and labelling.
- Biologging
- Attaching devices such as GPS tags to animals to record movement, behaviour or physiology.
- Passive acoustic monitoring
- Leaving sound recorders in the field and analysing the recordings for animal calls.
- Telemetry
- Remote measurement and transmission of data from a device on an animal, such as GPS positions or radio signals.
- Fix
- A single recorded position from a tracking device.
- Passive acoustic monitoring
- Recording sound in the field with unattended recorders to detect animals.
- Spectrogram
- A picture of sound showing frequency over time, used to identify calls.
- Remote sensing
- Measuring the Earth's surface from satellites, aircraft or drones.
- Sampling effort
- How much searching was done: time, distance, number of devices or visits. Needed to compare counts.
- Verification
- Checking an identification, by experts or a community, before a record is used.
Entry 011 — Questions
Frequently asked questions
What is wildlife data management?
The structured process of collecting, storing, organising, analysing and archiving data about wild animals and their habitats, from sources such as camera traps, tracking tags, acoustic sensors and field observations, so it can be trusted, reused and acted on.
Which standard should I use for camera-trap data?
Camtrap DP is the community-developed exchange format for camera-trap data, maintained under TDWG. Occurrences derived from it map to Darwin Core, which GBIF uses.
How do I share camera-trap data with GBIF?
GBIF's guide to managing and publishing camera trap data describes the route: export a Camtrap DP package from your management system and publish it through a GBIF IPT installation.
How do I protect the locations of sensitive species?
GBIF's best-practice guidance is to generalise coordinates in the copy you share, not in your stored records, and to document what was withheld or generalised (Darwin Core fields informationWithheld and dataGeneralizations).
Can AI identify species reliably?
Models such as MegaDetector and SpeciesNet speed up sorting a lot, but performance varies with species, region and image conditions. Keep a human review step and record who or what made each label.
Do I need a hosted platform or will open-source software do?
It depends on your team. Open-source and desktop tools give control and low licence cost but need setup and maintenance; hosted platforms take that work away but you depend on a provider. Check that any option exports to an open standard.
Does wildlife data management only mean camera traps?
No. It covers every source of data about wild animals and their habitats: camera traps, tracking, acoustic recorders, remote sensing, field surveys and citizen science. They share the same life cycle and many of the same standards.
Where should tracking data be archived?
Movebank is widely used to manage, share and archive animal tracking data, with access levels set by the data owner.