Oliver R Wearn

100 YEARS OF HISTORY Over the last decade, millions of people around the world have become aware of the camera trap. The candid images and videos that camera traps produce have been featured in countless documentaries, are widely shared on social media, and have been the focus of hugely popular citizen science projects. Less well known is the fact...

Artificial intelligence (AI) promises to be an invaluable tool for nature conservation, but its misuse could have severe real-world consequences for people and wildlife. Conservation scientists discuss how improved metrics and ethical oversight can mitigate these risks.

Camera traps have become a ubiquitous tool in ecology and conservation. They are routinely deployed in wildlife survey and monitoring work, and are being advocated as a tool for planetary-scale biodiversity monitoring. The camera trap's widespread adoption is predicated on the assumption of its effectiveness, but the evidence base for this is lacki...

Animal density is a fundamental parameter in ecology and conservation, and yet it has remained difficult to measure. For terrestrial mammals and birds, camera‐traps have dramatically improved our ability to collect systematic data across a large number of species, but density estimation (except for species with natural marks) is still faced with st...

The United Nations recently agreed to major expansions of global protected areas (PAs) to slow biodiversity declines1. However, although reserves often reduce habitat loss, their efficacy at preserving animal diversity and their influence on biodiversity in surrounding unprotected areas remain unclear2-5. Unregulated hunting can empty PAs of large...

Over the past few decades, the use of camera-traps has revolutionized our ability to monitor populations of wild terrestrial mammals. While methods to estimate abundance from individually-identifiable animals are well-established, they are mostly restricted to species with clear natural markings or else necessitate invasive and often costly animal...

Gibbons are often difficult to observe in dense forest habitats using traditional ground-based methods. This makes it challenging to estimate group sizes and, in turn, population sizes. This has proven to be a key constraint on accurate monitoring of the last remaining population of the Critically Endangered cao vit gibbon Nomascus nasutus . Howeve...

Biophysical and socio-cultural factors have jointly shaped the distribution of global biodiversity, yet relatively few studies have quantitatively assessed the influence of social and ecological landscapes on wildlife distributions. We sought to determine whether social and ecological covariates shape the distribution of a cultural keystone species...

Old-growth tropical forests are widely recognized as being immensely important for their biodiversity and high biomass1. Conversely, logged tropical forests are usually characterized as degraded ecosystems2. However, whether logging results in a degradation in ecosystem functions is less clear: shifts in the strength and resilience of key ecosystem...

Camera trap surveys are a popular ecological monitoring tool that produce vast numbers of images making their annotation extremely time‐consuming. Advances in machine learning, in the form of convolutional neural networks, have demonstrated potential for automated image classification, reducing processing time. These networks often have a poor abil...

Biophysical and socio-cultural factors have jointly shaped the distribution of global biodiversity, yet relatively few studies have quantitatively assessed the influence of social and ecological landscapes on wildlife distributions. We sought to determine whether social and ecological covariates shape the distribution of a cultural keystone species...

The Stability of Altered Forest Ecosystems (SAFE) Project has been running since 2011 in the state of Sabah, Malaysian Borneo. Over the past ten years we have conducted 19 studies that have generated data that can be used to compare the ecology of non-flying mammals in forest areas with those in oil palm plantations. This paper summarises informati...

Abstract The Annamite mountains of Vietnam and Laos are a global biodiversity hotspot harboring several threatened endemic species. Conservation efforts to protect these endemics are hampered by a lack of knowledge on their ecology and distribution. We conducted landscape scale camera‐trapping across six study areas in the Annamites to assess distr...

We are in the midst of a revolution in satellite technology, with the rapid development and advancement of small satellites (or SmallSats, i.e., satellites <180 kg). Here, we review the opportunities and challenges that such technology might afford in the field of conservation and ecology. SmallSat constellations may yield higher resolutions than t...

Recognizing the imperative to evaluate species recovery and conservation impact, in 2012 the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) called for development of a "Green List of Species" (now the IUCN Green Status of Species). A draft Green Status framework for assessing species' progress toward recovery, published in 2018, proposed 2 s...

Arboreal mammals form a diverse group providing ecologically important functions such as predation, pollination and seed dispersal. However, their cryptic and elusive nature, and the heights at which they live, makes studying these species challenging. Consequently, our knowledge of rainforest mammals is heavily biased towards terrestrial species,...

Kon Plong is a mountainous district located in northeast Kon Tum Province, in the southern-central Annamite mountains of Vietnam. For the first time, these forests have been systematically and intensively surveyed, using the latest scientific methods. These surveys have revealed the surprising and abundant biodiversity values of Kon Plong’s forests...

A participatory monitoring programme of an exceptional modification of urban soundscapes during Covid-19 containment.

Integrated high-resolution maps of carbon stocks and biodiversity that identify areas of potential co-benefits for climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation can help facilitate the implementation of global climate and biodiversity commitments at local levels. However, the multi-dimensional nature of biodiversity presents a major chall...

There is no shortage of opinions on the impact of artificial intelligence and deep learning. We invited authors of Comment and Perspective articles that we published in roughly the first half of 2019 to look back at the year and give their thoughts on how the issue they wrote about developed.

Camera traps are a vital tool for ecologists to enable them to monitor wildlife over large areas in order to determine population changes, habitat, and behaviour. As a result, camera-trap datasets are rapidly growing in size. Recent advancements in Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) have emerged in image recognition and detection tasks which are now...

Vulnerability to habitat fragmentation Habitat fragmentation caused by human activities has consequences for the distribution and movement of organisms. Betts et al. present a global analysis of how exposure to habitat fragmentation affects the composition of ecological communities (see the Perspective by Hargreaves). In a dataset consisting of 448...

Beyond broad‐scale investigations of species diversity and abundance, there is little information on how land conversion in the tropics is affecting the behavior and demographics of surviving species. To fill these knowledge gaps, we explored the effects of land‐use change on the ecologically important and threatened bearded pig (Sus barbatus) over...

Despite being heavily exploited, pangolins (Pholidota: Manidae) have been subject to limited research, resulting in a lack of reliable population estimates and standardised survey methods for the eight extant species. Camera trapping represents a unique opportunity for broad-scale collaborative species monitoring due to its largely non-discriminato...

Despite being heavily exploited, pangolins (Pholidota: Manidae) have been subject to limited research, resulting in a lack of reliable population estimates and standardised survey methods for the eight extant species. Camera trapping represents a unique opportunity for broad-scale collaborative species monitoring due to its largely non-discriminato...

Carnivores have long been used as model organisms to examine mechanisms that allow coexistence among ecologically similar species. Interactions between carnivores, including competition and predation, comprise important processes regulating local community structure and diversity. We use data from an intensive camera-trapping monitoring program acr...

Model selection analysis for occupancy (Ψ) and detection probability (p) used to evaluate the effect of time (sampling period) and study site on the habitat use of three sympatric felids, the jaguar (Panthera onca), puma (Puma concolor) and ocelot (Leopardus pardalis) in Neotropical forests. (DOCX)

Prey species list and relative abundance index (images/100 ctdays) of small (< 15 Kg) and large prey (> 15Kg) of carnivores in our eight Neotropical study sites. (DOCX)

Spearman’s rank correlation to test for collinearity among continuous covariates (ρ> 0.70). (DOCX)

Coefficient of overlap (Δ1) with confidence intervals (CI lower/CI upper) and Watson’s two-sample test (two-sample U2) performed on pairwise comparisons between study sites. (DOCX)

Single-species detection models used to evaluate the effects of covariates on the detection probability (p) of three sympatric felids, the jaguar (Panthera onca), puma (Puma concolor) and ocelot (Leopardus pardalis) in Neotropical forests. Detection probability was modelled as a function of elevation, NDVI, study site (site), large prey availabilit...

Single-species occupancy models used to evaluate the effects of elevation (Elev.), distance to nearest water source (water), NDVI (ndvi), small prey’s availability (small) and large prey’s availability (large) on the habitat use of jaguar (Panthera onca), puma (Puma concolor) and ocelot (Leopardus pardalis) in Neotropical forests. (DOCX)

Coefficient of overlap (Δ) with confidence intervals (CI lower/CI upper) and Watson’s two-sample test (two-sample U2) performed on pairwise comparisons between cat species per site. (DOCX)

Single-species occupancy models used to evaluate best habitat factors and species interactions. Occupancy probability was modelled as a function of elevation (Elev.), distance to water (water), NDVI (ndvi), small prey’s availability (small), large prey’s availability (large) and occupancy estimates of each cat species (jaguar, puma and ocelot). (DO...

Differences in the daily activity level (i. e., proportion of hours per day that an animal is active), standard errors (SE), Wald test (W) of Neotropical cats across the eight study sites (*Significant difference <0.05). (DOCX)

Camera traps are a widely used tool in wildlife research and conservation, but in situ factors such as theft, poor performance in extreme environments and damage by wildlife may be hindering the effectiveness of the technology. However , we still know little about how widespread these constraints are and which are the priorities to solve in the sho...

Understanding temporal change and long-term persistence of species and communities is vital if we are to accurately assess the relative values of human-modified habitats for biodiversity. Despite a large literature and emerging consensus demonstrating a high conservation value of selectively logged tropical rainforests, few studies have taken a lon...

The assembly of species communities at local scales is thought to be driven by environmental filtering, species interactions and spatial processes such as dispersal limitation. Little is known about how the relative balance of these drivers of community assembly changes along environmental gradients, especially man‐made environmental gradients asso...

The scale of the ongoing biodiversity crisis requires both effective conservation prioritisation and urgent action. As extinction is non-random across the tree of life, it is important to prioritise threatened species which represent large amounts of evolutionary history. The EDGE metric prioritises species based on their Evolutionary Distinctivene...

ED and EDGE scores. The ED and EDGE scores for all amphibians, birds, mammals and reptiles, and the robust priority species from each group. (XLSX)

Examination of robust species assumption. (DOCX)

The scale of the ongoing biodiversity crisis requires both effective conservation prioritisation and urgent action. The EDGE metric, which prioritises species based on their Evolutionary Distinctiveness (ED) and Global Endangerment (GE), relies on adequate phylogenetic and extinction risk data to generate meaningful priorities for conservation. How...

Carbon‐based policies provide powerful opportunities to unite tropical forest conservation with climate change mitigation. However, their effectiveness in delivering biodiversity co‐benefits is dependent on high levels of biodiversity being found in high carbon areas. Previous studies have focussed solely on the co‐benefits associated with Reducing...

Forest edges influence more than half of the world's forests and contribute to worldwide declines in biodiversity and ecosystem functions. However, predicting these declines is challenging in heterogeneous fragmented landscapes. Here we assembled a global dataset on species responses to fragmentation and developed a statistical approach for quantif...

Recent work in the tropics has advanced our understanding of the local impacts of land-use change on species richness. However, we still have a limited ability to make predictions about species abundances, especially in heterogeneous landscapes. Species abundances directly affect the functioning of an ecosystem and its conservation value. We applie...

Camera traps set to monitor target species generate large amounts of bycatch data of non-target species, which are secondary to the study’s objectives. Bycatch data pooled from multiple studies can answer additional questions that were not the objective of the primary studies. Variation in field and data management techniques creates logistical and...

The age and sex differences in the plumages of Bornean Lophura pheasants are poorly known and limit accurate documentation of the ecology, distribution, phenology and conservation status of these elusive and threatened forest taxa. Remotely triggered camera-traps, however, offer a potentially untapped resource. We studied camera-trap footage (825 s...

Knowledge of fundamental aspects of ecology such as species richness and distribution, and the factors affecting them, is increasingly used to identify priority areas for conservation and to effectively manage threatened species. We investigated the species richness and distribution pattern of non-human primate communities inhabiting 10 sampling si...

Document S1. Figures S1–S4, Tables S1 and S2, and Supplemental Experimental Procedures

Tropical deforestation has caused a significant share of carbon emissions and species losses, but historical patterns have rarely been explicitly considered when estimating these impacts [1]. A deforestation event today leads to a time-delayed future release of carbon, from the eventual decay either of forest products or of slash left at the site [...

Invasive species pose one of the greatest threats to biodiversity. This study investigates the extent to which human disturbance to natural ecosystems facilitates the spread of non-native species, focusing on a small mammal community in selectively logged rain forest, Sabah, Borneo. The microhabitat preferences of the invasive Rattus rattus and thr...

Diversity responses to land-use change are poorly understood at local scales, hindering our ability to make forecasts and management recommendations at scales which are of practical relevance. A key barrier in this has been the underappreciation of graindependent diversity responses and the role that β-diversity (variation in community composition...

Invertebrates are dominant species in primary tropical rainforests, where their abundance and diversity contributes to the functioning and resilience of these globally important ecosystems. However, more than one-third of tropical forests have been logged, with dramatic impacts on rainforest biodiversity that may disrupt key ecosystem processes. We...

Understanding the habitat preferences of native and non-native species may offer valuable insights into the mechanisms favouring invasion of disturbed habitats. This study investigated the determinants of trap-site detection probability of three native (Maxomys surifer, Maxomys whiteheadi and Leopoldamys sabanus) and one invasive (Rattus rattus) sp...