Snapshot Europe 2022

Welcome and thank you for considering participating in Snapshot EU!
Snapshot EU is a collaborative and volunteer-based project aiming to monitor mammals across the whole of Europe through a coordinated and standardized camera trap effort. The study is designed to sample sites in all countries stratified across all habitat types and development zones (suburban/rural/wild/urban). Collaborating camera trappers provide their own cameras and monitor 10-50 sites during September-October 2022.  We recommend at least 3 weeks per site, up to 2 months.  If you have only a few cameras, it is therefore better to rotate the cameras once to get more sites than to leave them in one place all the time.

The group then makes the data available through a large collaborative publication, and also uses it to address their own research questions.
Snapshot Europe is in partnership with Snapshot USA and supported by Euromammals https://euromammals.org 

Snapshot EU Rules

1) Each collaborator selects one combination of setting (Urban, Suburban, Rural, Wild, Other) and habitat (agricultural areas, artificial non-agricultural vegetated areas i.e. gardens and parks, shrubby vegetation, pastures and natural grassland, forest, open areas i.e. beaches, burnt areas and glaciers, wetland) to focus on when deploying camera traps.                  

2) Between 7 and 40 camera traps will be deployed across 10 to 50 locations matching the selected setting-habitat combination. The location, start date, end date, and camera make and model for each deployment must be recorded.                                                                                                     

3) Collaborators can use any model of camera that has a) IR (infrared) flash, b) a trigger
speed less or equal to 0.5, and c) can fire a burst of pictures without delay between a trigger
and the next. Cameras must be set in rapid-fire mode and take, at a minimum, 3 images per
burst.

4) Cameras should be placed so that they are 50 cm off the ground and with regular orientation.                                                                                                                   

5) The deployed cameras must be at least 200 meters away from other cameras (but no farther than 5 kilometers).                                                                               

6) No food bait or scent lure will be used.

7) While cameras can be placed on trails or logging roads, this must be indicated by the collaborator.

8) Once field work is complete, the collaborator will upload images and metadata to Wildlife
Insights. Our goal is to have all data uploaded by December 1st and reviewed by January
31, 2023. We encourage collaborators to identify their favorite pictures, so that we can
highlight these in the collection.