University of Idaho researchers develop a less invasive wildlife trap that collects data

Camera trap is another name for a trail cam.

It is a type of remote camera activated by an infrared beam that detects movement and is used to capture images of wildlife – often traveling on a forest trail  – with little human interference.

Emma Hakanson, a U of I graduate student and northern Idaho ground squirrel researcher, wants to make clear the distinction between a traditional trap, a device that catches and restrains animals, and the kind of “trap” she tested last summer as part of a U of I research team.

Her trap not only takes pictures of small animals that enter the boxed enclosure to grab bait, but it weighs, measures and identifies individual animals if they had been previously tagged with a microchip.

The only thing this trap – known as WildMarker – captures are data.

WildMarker is a unique monitoring device developed at the University of Idaho by a team of electrical and mechanical engineers, as well as AI experts, software developers and biologists.

“The team building these boxes is composed of faculty, staff and students across several departments,” Hakanson said.

WildMarker is outfitted with a camera, scale and a variety of electronic devices to collect data from small, rodent-sized animals. It’s the same data a biologist might collect if he or she captured the animal in a traditional live trap, but in this case, scientists don’t need to lay a hand on the animal.

“It’s a lot less invasive,” said Hakanson, who is earning a Master of Science in bioinformatics and computational biology through the College of Science. She spent the summer in Bear, Idaho, west of Council, where she field-tested the WildMarker prototype as a reliable data collection device.

Hakanson and the WildMarker team deployed the AI device alongside traditional traps to evaluate its performance under diverse field conditions.

They captured 276 individual animals – northern Idaho ground squirrels, Columbian ground squirrels, deer mice and chipmunks – in traditional live traps and outfitted many of them with microchips called PIT (Passive Integrated Transponder) tags that allows WildMarker to identify the rodents. WildMarker successfully documented 55 of these tagged animals, as well as many unknown individuals.

One aspect of conserving the northern Idaho ground squirrel is finding new populations of the indigenous rodent. Hakanson hopes that WildMarker can assist in that effort.

“Since northern Idaho ground squirrels are a threatened species and a lot of work goes into locating currently unknown populations, using the WildMarker prototype could potentially be another method to document their presence,” she said.

The small squirrels stand about 7 inches tall, spend a lot of their time in underground burrows and are more difficult to see than the much larger Columbian squirrels, making individuals and new populations difficult to detect in the field.

Researchers have been monitoring the threatened northern Idaho ground squirrel for decades. The species live in dry meadows, solely in Adams and Valley counties west of McCall. Once in a rapid decline, the population of the native ground squirrel now holds steady at about 2,000 animals on about 7 square miles.  Its range completely overlaps with the much larger Columbian ground squirrel.

“If Columbian and northern Idaho ground squirrels can use similar habitat, and the Columbian is much larger, more numerous and can probably outcompete the smaller northern Idaho squirrel, the question is, why is the northern Idaho squirrel still around,” Hakanson said.

Her master’s degree research is trying to answer that question.

In the meantime, however, U of I scientists and engineers hope that WildMarker will prove to be an invaluable device that can be deployed throughout the landscape around Bear to assist researchers studying various aspects of these squirrels’ ecology.