4.0 Objectives#
An essential first step when designing any survey is to clearly define its objectives. Survey Objectives should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound (i.e., SMART). Survey Objectives should describe the following:
Target Species - the species that the survey is designed to detect,
State variable(s) - a formal measure that summarizes the state of a community or population at a particular time (Wearn & Glover-Kapfer, 2017) (e.g., species richness or population abundance), and
Proposed modelling approach(es) - the method used to analyze the camera data, which should depend on the state variable (e.g., occupancy models [MacKenzie et al., 2002], spatially explicit capture-recapture (SECR) models [e.g., Royle et al., 2009] for density estimation, etc.) and the Target Species. To learn more about the different modelling approaches, refer to Appendix A - Table A1, Appendix A - Table A2, and WildCAM’s resource library.
An example of a clearly defined Survey Objective could be “to monitor trends in wolverine occupancy at 5-year intervals from March – December 2020 to 2030 in wildlife management unit 539”.
The Survey Objective will determine the appropriate study design and deployment considerations (e.g., camera spacing, survey effort, attractants or not). For example, based on the above objective for our wolverine occupancy project, we “randomly selected camera locations within a 15 km x 15 km grid cell with one camera per location and a total of 60 stations across our study area. We will place lure dispensers at each camera location to increase the likelihood of detecting a wolverine.” to increase the likelihood of detecting a wolverine.”