Camera Base

Created by Mathias Tobler - Botanical Research Institute of Texas

Camera trap surveys produce hundreds if not thousands of photos during each survey. Managing all those photos and the corresponding information can be a difficult task. Camera Base is a tool that should help biologists manage the complete data for multiple camera trap surveys and provide tools for different types of data analysis. The tool was written and used to manage two surveys we carried out in Peru and has saved us a lot of time.

Features

Data Management
  • Manage multiple surveys in one database
  • Manage all photos of all species
  • Link photos to the data for browsing within the database
  • Identify individuals for capture-recapture analysis interactively
Analysis and outputs
  • Show a summary of number of photos and capture frequencies (N captures / 1000 camera days) for each species
  • Show a photo report for each species
  • Run capture-recapture analysis in CAPTURE directly out of Camera Base
  • Calculate Mean Maximum Distance Moved (MMDM)
  • Show activity pattern graphs
  • Automatically assign to each photo if it was taken during the day, night or dusk or dawn based on sunrise and sunset calculated for the survey location for each specific date.
  • Mark each photo as independent or dependent event based on a user defined minimum time interval.
  • Export data to Mark, Presence, EstimateS and other statistical or GIS software

Camera Base is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3 http://www.gnu.org/licenses/

Requirements

Camera Base was written in Microsoft Access 2003 and was tested with MS Office XP 2002 and 2003. It should work in future Office versions but might need some testing. It will probably not work properly in Office 2000 or earlier versions.
Hard drive space: The installation uses about 10 MB of space. The space required for your photos largely depends on the resolution but can be 100s of MB for a whole survey.
RAM: 512 MB is generally recommended if you are running Windows XP. However, the database should work fine with less RAM. The photo report requires a lot of memory and you might run into problems when creating a report with a large number of images.

Download

Camera Base 1.3 - Complete installation including documentation.
Camera Base User Guide - Full documentation of the Camera Base application. (PDF, requires Acrobat Reader).

Feedback

If you have questions or comments about Camera Base or would like to contribute to its continued development, please contact Mathias Tober - matobler@brit.org

Acknowledgements

Funding for this work comes from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation through a grant to the Botanical Research Institute of Texas. Camera trap work that led to the creation of this database was carried out in collaboration with the WWF AREAS project. I would like to thank Samia Carrillo-Percastegui for continuous input and testing during the development of this database.

The code used to calculate sunset and sunrise was translated from a NOAA Javascript to VBA by Greg Pelletier. http://www.ecy.wa.gov/programs/eap/models.html

Parsing EXIF data is done with the EXIF Reader Class: http://sourceforge.net/projects/exifclass/

Image processing is done with the help of the software Irfan View 3.98, written by Irfan Skiljan. http://www.irfanview.com/

Camera Base screenshot