Wildlife of Los Angeles

Understanding Urban Wildlife

In the United States greater than 80% of the human population occurs in cities, yet we know very little about the wildlife in these areas. Much work needs to be done to understand how increases in urbanized areas impact wildlife species and their ability to survive around us. Urbanization poses many threats to wildlife such as loss of habitat, fragmentation of habitat, roads and traffic, poisons and toxins, people, and our pets. This project is striving to collect information that can be used by city planners to help them make educated decisions about wildlife when planning future developments.

To better understand what wildlife species are present and identify spatial and long-term patterns of wildlife in Los Angeles we have began a camera project where we monitor sites throughout a variety of urban densities. Cameras are placed in urban and rural parks, golf courses, and undeveloped strips of land where permission could be obtained to mount cameras. One of the main projects that will be posting photos on to this platform is currently monitoring 37 camera sites in areas within 2 km of the Los Angeles River. At each site a motion-triggered camera is deployed for one month four times per year once during each season. Cameras are monitored by partner groups (see team to identify groups involved) or volunteers that are participating in the project.

The City of Los Angeles is working to preserve biodiversity and are in need of wildlife occurrence information to assist with their city planning. Data from this project will help fill in some areas where there is little known information about local wildlife and help the city make educated decision in future planning.

National Park Service also monitors numerous other cameras to look at roadways and identify ways to improve permeability as well as cameras to monitor post fire areas. These data sets may also be put up on Zooniverse in their own work flow when the data is completed for the LA city camera project so please continue to check back even if all of the data has been completed for the LA River camera project.

Why we need your help

Zooniverse users are invaluable to the project and ultimately turn the photos into data that can be analyzed by tagging species and number of individuals. This data can be combined with info collected in the field and through remote sensing to identify factors that affect wildlife in the region. We also plan to use this data to visualize animal population changes through time and combined with other data enable us to see if populations increase or decrease with changes on the landscape.

We are hoping that you will assist us with this project and see what is living among the millions of people living in the Los Angeles area: such as lions, bears, coyotes, gray foxes, opossums, roadrunners and many other species. Share your favorites and join the discussion about what you are observing along the way. As the project progresses, we will share with you what we are learning on this project and other work our scientists at the park are learning in Talk and through the Santa Monica Mountains NRA and SAMO Funds social media accounts. So please stay tuned and help us move this project forward.

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