Investigating animal activity patterns and temporal niche partitioning using camera‐trap data: challenges and opportunities

Abstract

Time-stamped camera data are increasingly used to study temporal patterns in species and community ecology, including species' activity patterns and niche partitioning. Given the importance of niche partitioning for facilitating coexistence between sympatric species, understanding how emerging environmental stressors -climate and landscape change, biodiversity loss and concomitant changes to community composition -affect temporal niche partitioning is of immediate importance for advancing ecological theory and informing management decisions. A large variety of analytical approaches have been applied to camera-trap data to ask key questions about species activity patterns and temporal overlap among heterospecifics. Despite the many advances for describing and quantifying these temporal patterns, few studies have explicitly tested how interacting biotic and abiotic variables influence species' activity and capacity to segregate along the temporal niche axis. To address this gap, we suggest coordinated distributed experiments to capture sufficient camera-trap data across a range of anthropogenic stressors and community compositions. This will facilitate a standardized approach to assessing the impacts of multiple variables on species' behaviours and interactions. Ultimately, further integration of spatial and temporal analyses of camera-trap data is critical for improving our understanding of how anthropogenic activities and landscape changes are altering competitive interactions and the dynamics of animal communities.

Relationships between humans and ungulate prey shape Amur tiger occurrence in a core protected area along the Sino‐Russian border

“…Temporal avoidance of human activity may be survival strategies to facilitate this population dispersal from low‐disturbance habitat to high disturbance. One potential weakness of our temporal activity analysis could be sample size, especially of tigers, but we obtained ample sample sizes of prey species (Frey, Fisher, Burton, Volpe, & Rowcliffe, ).…”

American marten and fisher do not segregate in space and time during winter in a mixed‐forest system

“…Understanding how ecologically similar species coexist is an important issue in ecology (Frey, Fisher, Burton, & Volpe, ). Distinguishing patterns of co‐occurrence between species can identify the potential for ecological interactions (Waddle et al, ).…”

Camera traps as a tool for Carnivore conservation in a mosaic of Protected Areas in the Pantanal wetlands, Brazil

“…Camera trapping has proved to be one of the most useful tools for wildlife surveys as it is non-invasive and provides information on cryptic and inconspicuous species (Harmsen et al, 2009;Sarmento et al, 2009;Surnato et al, 2013). Data obtained from camera trapping can be used to study several topics of animal ecology such as inventories (Srbek-Araujo & Chiarello, 2005;Tobler et al, 2008), site occupancy (Mackenzie & Royle, 2005;O'Connell et al, 2006;Rich et al, 2013), patterns of spatial partitioning among species (Sarmento et al, 2011;Sollmann et al, 2012), temporal interactions between species as well as activity patterns (Foster et al, 2013;Frey et al, 2017). In the last two decades, several factors contributing to Neotropical carnivore coexistence have been studied using camera trapping (Vieira & Port, 2007;Di Bitetti et al, 2010;Bianchi et al, 2016).…”