Camera traps and guard observations as an alternative to researcher observation for studying anthropogenic foraging

Walton, B.J.; Findlay., L.J.; Hill, R.A.

doi:10.1002/ece3.8808

Camera traps and guard observations as an alternative to researcher observation for studying anthropogenic foraging

Walton, B.J.; Findlay., L.J.; Hill, R.A.

Authors

Ben Walton benjamin.j.walton@durham.ac.uk
Combined Role

Dr Leah Findlay l.j.findlay@durham.ac.uk
Honorary Fellow

Professor Russell Hill r.a.hill@durham.ac.uk
Professor

Abstract

Foraging by wildlife on anthropogenic foods can have negative impacts on both hu-mans and wildlife. Addressing this issue requires reliable data on the patterns of an-thropogenic foraging by wild animals, but while direct observation by researchers can be highly accurate, this method is also costly and labor-intensive, making it impractical in the long-term or over large spatial areas. Camera traps and observations by guards employed to deter animals from fields could be efficient alternative methods of data collection for understanding patterns of foraging by wildlife in crop fields. Here, we investigated how data on crop-foraging by chacma baboons and vervet monkeys col-lected by camera traps and crop guards predicted data collected by researchers, on a commercial farm in South Africa. We found that data from camera traps and field guard observations predicted crop loss and the frequency of crop-foraging events from researcher observations for crop-foraging by baboons and to a lesser extent for vervets. The effectiveness of cameras at capturing crop-foraging events was depend-ent on their position on the field edge. We believe that these alternatives to direct observation by researchers represent an efficient and low-cost method for long-term and large-scale monitoring of foraging by wildlife on crops.

Citation

Walton, B., Findlay., L., & Hill, R. (2022). Camera traps and guard observations as an alternative to researcher observation for studying anthropogenic foraging. Ecology and Evolution, 12(4), Article e8808. https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.8808

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Mar 21, 2022
Online Publication Date	Apr 13, 2022
Publication Date	Apr 13, 2022
Deposit Date	Apr 9, 2022
Publicly Available Date	Apr 14, 2022
Journal	Ecology and Evolution
Publisher	Wiley Open Access
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	12
Issue	4
Article Number	e8808
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.8808
Keywords	Chlorocebus, crop foraging, crop-raiding, human–wildlife conflict, human–wildlife interactions, Papio

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Copyright Statement
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.© 2022 The Authors. Ecology and Evolution published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.