Western Shield — Camera Watch

A huge thank you to all those volunteers who have assisted with our images so far. In 2019 we had over 1800 of our registered volunteers classify our images. The information you have gathered has contributed significantly to our knowledge to date and we will be rolling out similar monitoring in other parts of Western Australia in 2020-2021. We hope to have other projects coming online soon.

A snap shot of the images you classified in 2019

Over 36 000 subject sets were classified in 2019 which amounted to over 540 000 classifications. That is a lot of clicks! Below is a summary of what you have helped us discover.

Foxes are still detected in areas in which we control their numbers however the number of times we see them is far fewer compared to what we see in areas in which there is no management (Figure 1). More importantly, in fox managed areas we are seeing many more images of the types of animal’s foxes typically eat (i.e. possums, echidnas, woylies, quenda, chuditch and tammar wallabies). In fact, seven times more detections of native mammal species that are sensitive to fox predation, are recorded in fox managed areas compared to areas with no fox management. We also detect many more images of birds, including emus.

Figure 1: Summary of the number of subjects classified to each species/animal group in areas where we attempt to manage the number of foxes (first pie)and in areas where no fox management is implemented (second pie). Numbers indicate the number of detections of each species/animal group. BGW = Black-gloved Wallaby

It is also interesting to note that pigs and rabbits are more common in areas in which we do not foxes. We knew pigs and rabbits occurred in our forests but we were unaware that their numbers were higher in areas NOT managed for foxes.

Do fox numbers change over time

Since the commencement of the project in 2014 we have been logging the detections of foxes in and out of our managed areas. What we have discovered is that overall fox activity is suppressed in fox managed areas (Figure 2) compared to unmanaged areas (Figure 3).

A fox captured on one of our many cameras. Movement of the fox together with the light from the flash has created this stunning halo effect

Figure 2: Mean daily detection of foxes in areas with fox control

Figure 3: Mean daily detection of foxes in areas with no fox control. The substantial increase in fox detections in 2017 is likely a post fire population boom after a wildfire affected the area in 2015.

Feral cats?

Cats are recorded equally in both management types but at a much lower frequency than foxes. We are still trying to work out how we can effectively manage cats in forested areas. As a Zooniverse volunteer your hard work is giving us some valuable insights on where cats tend to spend their time, which can help us target management to best support our threatened species.

A cat with a chuditch (a native Australian marsupial predator) in its mouth