Camera Traps Stories

  • The trails we share: using camera traps to track how people and wildlife coexist

    In a park in British Columbia, Canada, WWF scientist Robin Naidoo has spent the past eight years using hidden cameras to capture how people and wildlife share the same trails. The pictures depict how human recreation and wildlife movement overlap.

    Images from camera traps showing a grizzly bear, deer, mountain goats, and a biker
  • How artificial intelligence buys valuable time to protect wildlife

    May 14, 2024

    Wildlife Insights is an online platform that uses artificial intelligence to automatically filter out all those pesky blank images, find the ones that contain wildlife, and identify which species is in a photo—even if it’s just the end of a tail or the tip of a nose! Wildlife Insights is currently able to identify 1,300 different species.

    A camera trap image shows a gray koala walking on the ground toward the left edge of the frame
  • Camera traps showcase Malaysia’s incredible biodiversity

    November 09, 2023

    Months after their initial setup, the camera traps revealed the rich diversity of wildlife in one of the world’s oldest forests and what’s at stake if poaching, deforestation, and human-wildlife conflict are not addressed.

    tiger looks into camera trap in Royal Belum State Park, Malaysia
  • After Australia’s devastating wildfires, camera traps capture remarkable wildlife recovering

    May 15, 2023

    With a range of on-the-ground partners, the Eyes on Recovery team deployed camera traps in eight fire-affected regions to better understand the disaster’s impacts and how species are recovering.

    A wombat and its baby look at the camera
  • How scientists count tigers in India

    January 27, 2022

    From dense jungles to the Himalayas, tigers are an elusive species—hard to find and hard to count. But, thanks to the use of camera traps, the movements and behaviors of tigers are now less of a mystery.

    A tiger walks across leaves in the jungle in India
  • An Eye on Recovery

    December 17, 2020

    WWF is helping to support Australia’s first large-scale collaborative camera trap project.

    Two men crouching down on the ground to set up netting and a camera to capture images of wildlife passing by
  • Employing AI to evaluate wildlife populations on a global scale

    WWF Magazine: Winter 2020
    Launched in December 2019 by Google and a host of conservation partners, Wildlife Insights offers a simple upload system, cloud-based storage, and AI tagging and analysis.
    Wildlife Insights logo
  • Tiger spotted at record-high elevation in Nepal

    April 28, 2020

    New camera trap images reveal the highest-elevation sighting of a tiger in Nepal, captured at over 8,000 feet in a densely forested area.

    Camera trap image of tiger at high elevation
  • Harvesting trees without harming wildlife

    WWF Magazine: Winter 2019
    New images from the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve in the Brazilian Amazon show what conservationists have long known: that people harvesting trees responsibly can live harmoniously with animals.
    Bushdog
  • The world’s rarest big cat grows in number

    April 13, 2018

    The Land of the Leopard National Park is the core area for the Amur leopard. New images documented 84 adult cats and 19 cubs inside the park. This is a significant increase since a 2000 census recorded just 30 cats, and a 2015 survey numbered only 70.

     

    camera trap image of Amur leopard
  • New photo evidence of snow leopards in northeast India

    October 23, 2017

    For perhaps the first time ever, a snow leopard was captured by a camera trap in a remote forest in the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. Arunachal Pradesh remains largely unexplored, making this photographic evidence of snow leopards especially significant. 

    snow leopard caught by camera trap
  • A photographer hikes to 11,000 feet in search of the tigers of Bhutan

    WWF Magazine: Winter 2017
    In March, French photographer Emmanuel Rondeau ventured into the dense mountain forests of Bhutan.
    bhutan tiger caught winter2017
  • Amazing image of wild tiger in Bhutan

    July 28, 2017

    Filmmaker and photojournalist Emmanuel Rondeau spent four weeks in the wildlife corridors of Bhutan with a camera trap poised to capture the elusive tiger. After weeks of waiting, a tiger appeared on the final day of the expedition. The result? The first high-resolution camera trap image of a wild tiger in Bhutan captured above 11,000 feet.

    A tiger walking in Bhutan.
  • Photographing Africa's most elusive animals

    WWF Magazine: Spring 2016
    In a landscape largely undocumented by science, a researcher and a photographer team up to illuminate more than the night
    Male Lion in camera trap
  • Can dairy cows in Maryland help protect rhinos in East Africa?

    WWF Magazine: Spring 2016
    In other words: Can livestock in the United States help us test thermal camera technology slated to protect rhinos in East Africa?
    Thermal video camera
  • Optical Awareness

    WWF Magazine: Winter 2013
    Display demonstrating how a camera trap works