I am currently working in Cameroon on wildlife assessment with camera-traps, aim to compare faunal biodiversity between 4 different land tenures regimes. The objective is to quantify afterwards diversities indices between 4 sites. After discussions with specialists, I would like to have your opinion. I plan to divide my 44 cameras into 4 grids, corresponding to my 4 land tenures regimes, during 3 months. Cameras will be placed with a distance of 1.4 km between each other (TEAM protocol). I have 11 cameras available for each grid, but I have an important question about one of them: one of our land tenures regimes is composed of 3 distinct community forests of 5,000 hectares each.
We have three possibilities concerning the distribution of cameras for this land tenure: (i) we can use 3-4 cameras in each community forest during 3 months, (ii) we can set up 11 cameras in each community forest one by one and each during 1 month (but it will not be possible to keep the 1.4km distance between cameras, considering the small size of community forests), or (iii) we can put the all 11 cameras in only one community forest during 3 months, but taking maybe then less heterogeneity of landscape patterns.
Would it be better to maximize the sampled zone with a maximum of time and a minimum of cameras, or to reduce the time and put more cameras in each sub-zone? Are 700-800 camera-trap days ( < 1000 camera-trap days) enough to obtain valuable data ?
Thanks a lot!
Hard to say. Are these forest elephants roaming around within the forest, rather than some season in the savanna or more open terrain as in southern and eastern Africa (see may various elephant papers)? Are you actually trapping/attracting elephants by feeding or otherwise or relying on known congregations at wallowing sites within the forest?
If you are going to compare 4 sites you need to sample all the habitats simultaniously. No of camera traps for each site will depend on the extent of the habitats and need to lay out traps proportinately . You can get the Spatial and temporal changes of diversity as well.
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