GBIF BIFA Asian vertebrates workshop 2022

Systematically sampling dozens of species across a dozen counties is often beyond individual or even institutional capacity and scope. In Asia, there is growing support for collaborative data-sharing efforts to assemble the necessary wildlife datasets and address the region’s acute biodiversity crisis. Camera traps are commonly deployed in Asia’s dense tropical and subtropical evergreen forests to sample cryptic charismatic megafauna like tigers and clouded leopards. The bycatch from these relatively standardized landscape-scale single-species surveys is often reported in the published literature, supplements, or stakeholder reports. The region benefits from widespread training programs from governments, NGOs and academics that promote systematically setting cameras, generally, 10-100 cameras set on wildlife or human trails at 20-50cm in a grid with 0.5– 3 km spacing and active for 1-3 months. We collated 119 camera sources/datasets that include 16793 camera stations and 986,673 trap nights covering 12 countries (including Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei, Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Nepal, and south China). There are 342,444 records of 387 species belonging to 181 genus and 72 families. Other useful summary statistics and covariates are included such as survey coordinates, trapping effort, numerous environmental covariates, and species traits. The full dataset will available here as a .csv file and with the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). We suggest CamTrapAsia’s species occurrences can address a variety of ecology and conservation questions, ranging from species ranges and species distribution modelling, threat assessments such as the impacts of defaunation, deforestation, and climate change, and that the total captures per species and relative capture rates (per unit effort or among the community) may be used for community ecology and food web analyses.