Have you considered multiple cameras, one with a wider field of scope, so you can validate that more peccary should be included in the inventory? Another thought would be to supplement the inventory data with a method other than camera trapping. For example in quail counts they use road counts and also number of whistles during mating season. We have peccary in Texas, but I don't know enough about their habits to suggest an additional method.

Your idea is not clear to me, I think the first method is not bad, what you want to find is relative abundance, because once obtained by this method you should make a curve of accumulation of species, putting as premise the Clench equation (which overestimates) and see if the values are acceptable, otherwise you could do this for the two methods and compare which is the best fit.Anyway I think of the proposal to see if by another method is more feasible.Let me know if it worked or how you did itregards

The problem with increasing the range of the capture with the cameras is that I think it is not reliable as a justification to include the species in your inventory.

It seems to me that no matter how sophisticated and scientific the approach, in the end you have a guess. At best a reasonable estimate as to the population of various species. There are some time accepted methods for quail. I know a bit about quail, and some methods are quite expensive and time consuming. Actually flushing coveys and making counts of the birds in flight. You an imagine how difficult this is when there are over 30 birds in a covey. But also keep in mind, no matter how accurate the count, it is a dynamic population in free range situations. Some animals move in and some move out and some die and some might be born. So it makes me wonder how much time should be spent trying to get a "better" estimate. Lots of time is spent each year with quail counts trying to estimate the populations in different zones in Texas. And the counts are interesting, but often don't predict a very accurate picture of the population when hunting season arrives. And everyone has an idea of what went wrong. Disease, heavy loses to predators, starvation, eye worms, habitat loss, and the list goes on and on. But it is the best tool we have, and I am glad that people are out there doing the best they can to estimate the population, and hope you come up with some good estimates.

We have a few peccary, but a much larger and more menacing population of feral hogs in Texas. Estimates are around 5 million feral hogs, and experts say we can never control them. I have no idea how they came up with the estimate of 5 million, but I expect that you could contact someone collecting data on feral hogs and see what methods they used. Feral hogs and peccary are closely related and separated about 40 million years ago. Perhaps you could see if they used camera traps and if so how they accounted for the fact that feral hogs often are in large groups (I have seen groups of over 50).

I understand you want to count each solitary species in an image as one individual. At the end you have total animals observed for that species.

Any collared peccary (one or more) in an image can be counted as one collared peccary *group*. Same for white lipped. At the end you have *total groups* and you multiply by mean number in a group for that peccary species.

Then you also need an estimate of peccary group size. This cannot be obtained from your camera traps because they 'see' only part of a group and it is not possible to determine if it was a large or a small group.

Perhaps you can get mean group size from published research, or 'typical group size' from visual observations. Alternatively, you could set up some separate cameras with wide view and longer recording duration, then count the number in each peccary group that passes the camera and take the mean.

Good luck with your project.

I am struggling through this with primates, I am conducting arboreal camera trap surveys. I rarely get more than a couple of individuals in a video, but I can hear vocalizations from animals out of view and see branches moving not associated with the monkeys in the detection zone. When I encounter them incidentally, they are usually in large groups.

The problem with expanding your event period to accommodate potential larger groups, is if you cannot identify individuals, you cannot tell if the animals passing by are different, or the same group foraging and possibly passing by the camera a second time.

How are you incorporating group size into an RAI? My understanding of RAI's are based on the number of events/ trap effort *100.