ESTIMATING THE POPULATION ABUNDANCE OF WILD FAUNA THROUGH THE USE OF CAMERA TRAPS

Abstract

Throughout time several measures have been used to restore, maintain and increase populations of game animals. One of these is artificial water or food troughs and monitoring populations with camera traps, as it is considered a non-invasive tool in the study of wild fauna. With the goal of identifying the benefits of water-food troughs as a combined wild fauna monitoring tool, photographs taken by 30 camera traps, rotated in 69 waterfood troughs at the “Rancho San Huberto” UMA in Sonora, México, were recorded during November and December 2011, and March 2012. With the information obtained, the species density per water-food trough was estimated, registered as number of individuals km^-2 day^-1, in an area defined by Thiessen polygons. The most abundant species were the male mule deer with a density of 1 specimen, the female mule deer with 1.66 specimens, collared peccary with 0.7, coyote with 0.1, Pacific dove with 0.8 and mourning dove with 0.2. The density recorded shows that information provided by the camera traps could be an important tool to estimate the abundance and distribution of different species of wild fauna present in a piece of land, in addition to providing information about the benefit of artificial water-food troughs, whose adequate management can be translated into an improvement of the habitat that promotes the presence and higher permanence of wild fauna species.