Red fox enjoying the morning sun (image: zladders)
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Welcome to MammalWeb's December update! Things are turning decidedly chilly out there, so our advice would be to put the kettle on and settle down to read about what's been going on with MammalWeb over recent months. We've been busy, so this is quite a packed newsletter. We have a brief explanation of our new-look communications, our usual update on numbers and the spotters' league, and some news about changes in the team. In addition, we explain coming changes in licensing for data records submitted to biodiversity repositories, MammalWeb's Russ Hill provides an update on one chapter in the PTES's pilot National Hedgehog Monitoring Programme, and King's College's Zosia Ladds explains why she's assessing the biodiversity value of cemeteries. Look out for Zosia's exciting announcement of a competition with fabulous prizes to be won! Finally, Steve Lindsay describes the challenge of photographing garden badgers, and we include a selection of photos favourited in recent months.
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A new look to communications |
After the best part of a decade, we are finally moving on from Dadamail as our newsletter provider. Dadamail was both free and impressively ethical – but its use required a lot of patience and experience. Formatting, in particular, was tricky for occasional users, which affected the enthusiasm of contributors to our communications team. Happily, we have discovered Email Octopus. Email Octopus also prides itself on ethics – both in terms of the environment, and in its commitment to ethical email marketing. In addition, Email Octopus has reduced costs for non-profit organisations, which we are unlikely to complain about! Most importantly, we think it will be easier to produce good-looking communications using this service – and we hope you agree!
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Email Octopus screenshot on carbon neutrality
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MammalWeb activity, September to November |
To our top spotters over the past quarter, congratulations! But huge thanks to those on this list and to everyone else who has submitted classifications, helping us to make sense of the data that's being submitted. At the time of writing, somewhat over 980,000 image sequences and videos have been submitted to MammalWeb. This is an incredible resource for biodiversity monitoring – and we look forward to making it 1,000,000! Keep up the good work, everyone.
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First, massive thanks to Eloise Tugwell, who has been helping out with MammalWeb communications since May. We're hugely grateful to Eloise for all that she's done for MammalWeb over the past 6 months, and - amongst other things - for assembling some fantastic newsletters. We wish her success in her increasingly demanding job!
Second, we welcome Afthab Katakath to the MammalWeb team! Afthab, hailing from the lush tropical landscapes of Kerala, India, is a wildlife enthusiast with a background in Forestry and a specialisation in Wildlife Science. With a passion for the taxonomy and ecology of birds and mammals, he has previously excelled as a team leader in the 'Kerala Bird Atlas', Asia's largest citizen science project, conducted over five years. Afthab also holds the prestigious Erasmus Mundus Scholarship for his joint master's degree in the UK and Germany. As a recipient of an IAPETUS2 Doctoral Training Partnership PhD studentship, Afthab is embarking on a project in collaboration with the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) and MammalWeb. He aims to engage Garden BirdWatch volunteers from the BTO, encouraging them to deploy camera traps to observe the wildlife in their gardens. Through this citizen science initiative, Afthab aims to elicit data to shed light on the ecology of urban mammals and birds. Afthab recognises the transformative power of citizen science, especially in the context of affordable camera traps and the online reach of MammalWeb. This collaboration promises a deeper understanding of urban wildlife ecology and underscores the significance of community participation in preserving our urban wildlife.
Last, but by no means least, we are thrilled to congratulate Jonathan Rees, who recently defended his PhD thesis on "Artificial Intelligence and Camera Trapping: Investigating computer-based approaches to accelerate camera trap data processing". Jonathan's work on automated image classification has educated the whole team and paved the way for a new chapter in MammalWeb's development (see further below, and keep a look-out for developments)!
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Top: Afthab in the field in Kerala. Bottom: Jonathan Rees, flanked by examiners Russell Hill and Robin Freeman, holds a Python-themed cake to celebrate concluding his PhD viva (image: PA Stephens)
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Your data and biodiversity repositories |
As per our Terms and Conditions, we have been sharing biodiversity records (the most confident record of a given species, per site, per day) with biodiversity data repositories. Currently, the data go to the UK's National Biodiversity Network (NBN). The NBN has only a small number of licence options, and we have been sharing using a CC-BY-NC licence. This requires attribution but prevents commercial use of the data. NBN have requested that we change the licensing to CC-BY, which does not prevent commercial use of the data. Noting that many local records centres will be able to use our data ( inter alia) commercially, and noting also that our local records centres often rely on this form of income for their sustainability, we are going to make this change from the start of 2024. We will be announcing the change on our website and we encourage you to notify us if you have concerns about the data you contribute and, in turn, its likely contribution to biodiversity data repositories. As always, you can get in touch by emailing us at info@mammalweb.org.
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The National Hedgehog Monitoring Programme comes to Durham |
In early October, some of the MammalWeb team were joined by Dr Henrietta Pringle, National Hedgehog Monitoring Programme Project Coordinator at the People’s Trust for Endangered Species ( PTES). Leading a group including members of Durham University’s Sustainability Team and students from the Hedgehog Friendly Campus Society, we set up a camera survey for hedgehogs and other wildlife on the university estate. Durham University has a Gold Award status as a Hedgehog Friendly Campus and so it was an appropriate location for us to help support this pilot initiative led by PTES and supported by Natural England and the British Hedgehog Preservation Society. We will have a much longer update, next time, on MammalWeb’s involvement in the National Hedgehog Monitoring Programme and how you can help. For now, our 30-day survey, involving 30 camera locations, captured over 100,000 images, including some hedgehogs! The images will hopefully be available soon for spotting on MammalWeb, so keep an eye out for updates as this important project is formally launched.
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Top and middle: Setting up a camera trap and discussing the details of deployment in Durham (images: PA Stephens). Bottom: a hedgehog moving through student college grounds at night (image: the Durham NHMP team)
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Wild London: Secrets of the Cemeteries |
Cemeteries are found in cities all over the world, and are known for their peaceful atmosphere and cultural history. However, cemeteries can also be important sites for biodiversity in otherwise developed urban environments. The importance of this unique habitat is not particularly well understood, so we decided to study the contribution of cemeteries to biodiversity across the urban landscape, with a particular focus on mammals.
For this, we placed camera traps across 12 sites in London, including cemeteries and parks, to better understand the mammal communities and how these differ across different land use types. Over the course of the project, we have collected over 800,000 photographs in total. Thanks to the Camtrap Megadetector, a programme developed by our colleagues at the Institute of Zoology (and using the AI detection model originally produced by Microsoft's AI for Earth programme) that uses machine learning to separate animals, humans and blank photographs, we have been able to reduce this number to just over 97,000 sequences, but we need your help to classify them! We have lots of squirrels, foxes, dogs and cats, but also many different birds, including birds of prey! Every sequence you classify between the 2nd of December and the end of February 2024 will earn you a ticket in our prize draw to win a Camera Trap of your very own, or 3 runner-up prizes of a £50 Amazon voucher to spend on whatever you like. Every sequence gives you another entry, so please classify as many as possible and help us understand the hidden life of cemeteries and what animals are getting up to when no one else is around!
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Top: red fox carrying a freshly killed rat. Bottom: sparrowhawk collecting nesting material. (images: zladders)
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I have lived in my house for over 20 years. All our neighbours have had badgers visit their gardens, but not one has visited ours. What’s wrong with my garden? And then, one morning last August, I noticed some digging in my lawn. I thought, ‘that’s been a busy squirrel’. Then the following morning I found the ‘smoking gun evidence’. Not only had the metal bird-feeding station been bulldozed to the ground, but the feeders had also been torn open and emptied by something big. That’s no squirrel … oh, joy of joys, it’s got to be a badger! The following night, I waited up late and, eventually, through my binoculars, I saw the striped face of a badger bundling into the bottom of the garden. Its black stripes across its eyes made it look like a pantomime burglar. I went to bed ecstatically happy and hardly slept. Finally, badgers were coming to the garden. In fact, we have four badgers visiting the garden: two big adults, the boar and sow, and two cubs born this year. It’s wonderful to see them in the garden, especially when the cubs bounce around chasing each other. I started to feed them to help supplement their diet, since only half the cubs born this year will make it through winter. Although 90% of a badger’s diet is earthworms, they are omnivores and will eat all manner of things. I feed mine sunflower hearts and small amounts of peanuts. I reasoned that they would have been eating them anyway since so much falls out of the bird feeders when the nuthatches and goldfinches come to feed. Also, the badgers devour the seeds and nuts the nights we forget to take down the bird food and they ram raid the feeding station. But how to photograph these fabulous creatures? They come into the garden when it’s very dark and it’s impossible to see further than 15 metres. Low or no light is a big problem for photography. So, I bought two very low intensity 3W LED lamps used for illuminating gardens. And to my delight, one of the badgers, Humbug, the cleanest and prettiest of the two cubs, was brave enough to come into the light to feed. I think he’s a male since he has a broad head and his ears face forward, not sideways like the females. His tail is thin, unlike that of the female, which is triangular. Whilst badgers have excellent hearing and a sense of smell, their sight is not brilliant. I lay motionless in full camouflage on the floor, 3 m from him. From where I was lying, below the path where the badgers fed, I could hear the badgers eating, but couldn’t see Humbug until he popped out of the darkness and into the spotlight - like an actor on stage. In the photo, Humbug is leaning forward to sniff an apple I put out for him. It was probably the first one he’s seen. It took me 8 weeks to get this shot, gradually getting the badgers used to feeding in my garden under artificial light. Was it worth it wait? Absolutely! And they’re still coming nightly for their supper.
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The badger and the apple (image: Steve Lindsay)
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If you enjoyed Steve's tale of the badger and the apple, please let us know by emailing us at info@mammalweb.org. We'll pass on any feedback received.
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Hundreds of images have been favourited over recent months, and it would be a huge task to go through them all. However, here are some that caught our eyes ...
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From top to bottom (image credits): brown hare (Cartledge); grey squirrel (zladders); badger and fox (JFMyhill); roe deer (vkent); badger (Anina/PTES)
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