Thank you all for volunteering for the North Country Wild Project!

Due to the Covid pandemic, we're a bit behind on classifying images and updating our results. Stay tuned for results from 2021. Below are results from 2019.

2019 Results

We had a total of 147 volunteers. With your help, we classified 12808 events belonging to 73 of 96 cameras. Thanks to your support, we found several important findings:

1. We identified 21 different mammals species among all forest sites (including humans)
19 mammals identified in pine forests
18 mammals identified in deciduous forests

White–tailed deer was most frequently detected mammal
Mink, river otter, snowshoe hare, and owl were each detected on one camera

Table 1 List of species detected by forest. Forest abbreviations: BC = Beaver Creek, DEG = Degrasse, DON = Donnerville, SH = South Hammond, WF = Whiskey Flats, WHIP = Whippoorwill Corners. Each "x" indicates species presence recorded in the corresponding forest. Percent of forests is the percent of forests in which each species was detected. Naïve occupancy (%) is the percent of cameras at which a species occurs, and RAI (%) is the relative abundance index, a measure of the proportion of camera trap days on which a species was detected. White-tailed deer (in bold) was the most frequently detected species. Owl, river otter, and snowshoe hare (in bold) were the least frequently detected species.

2. Both replanted pine and deciduous forests supported a similar mammal diversity in St. Lawrence County.
We measured mammal diversity in three ways. In Fig. 2, we measured species richness, which is measured as the number of unique species we detected on our cameras.

Fig. 2 Mean mammal species richness observed at each forest type per season. Error bars display the standard deviation for each mean value.

In Fig. 3A, we measured Simpson's diversity index, which accounts for species richness and relative abundance. Shannon-Weiner diversity index, shown in Fig. 3B, also accounts for species richness and relative abundance.

Fig. 3 Bar graph showing mean Shannon-Weiner and Simpson's diversity index observed at each forest type per season. Error bars display the standard deviation for each mean value.

3. We detected the fewest number of mammals in the winter and spring seasons. This makes sense because of overwintering behaviors, such as hibernation, which reduce mammal activity and therefore decrease the probability of detection by our cameras.

4. Working with citizen scientists for photo classification is an effective and accurate method to collect data. You classified our photos with 99% accuracy!

Habitat conservation is not possible without invested human interest. Citizen science projects are successful methods to bring awareness to concepts such as wildlife corridors and the impacts of habitat fragmentation. The Algonquin to Adirondack corridor is a major resource for mammal movement. The more diverse the forests fragments are that connect the Adirondack and Algonquin parks, the greater the capacity for movement through the wildlife corridor. The information from our study can be used to help conservation biologists design the A2A wildlife corridor. We determined that although replanted pine forests had a similar mammal diversity to deciduous forests, forest type was not a statistically significant variable in predicting mammal diversity. Based on our results, forests in St. Lawrence County can likely support a wide range of mammals that might move through the corridor.

Still looking for more results? Check out this interactive app to learn what we found in the North Country!

Thank you again for your participation in classifying our images!