First, we apologies for posting this a bit later than usual, but as it is mentioned in the title fieldwork have some challenges and Zocay Project has not exceptions on this even after almost 19 years of visiting the same forest fragments and farms.
Depending on the focus of your fieldwork there are different challenges that comes with sampling in the field. When I started, those challenges include travelling to far remote areas, something that now is easier because Zocay Project study area is close to a town and public transport to that town runs daily, several times a day, which is a huge advantage when your presence is need it urgently. But what kind of things would require that you need to travel urgently to your field site…
Well, when your samplings require to put traps, like camera traps and the study site has flooded areas. This will mean that when rainy season start some streams, lagoons and swamp areas could be flooded in a matter of hours. These situations are common in Orinoquia and Amazon areas where certain areas of the forest are highly influenced by water level rises, that goes from a few centimeters to up to several meters (Amazon forests).
Other challenges include time to accommodate fieldwork and the rest of your job/ personal life. Although having a field site close to your home base can help, you also need flexibility in your job hours to be able to make quick trips to the field in case something happens or when that is not possible to be able to delegate those field activities to people you can trust to make the work in the same way you will do it. It is not always easy to delegate activities, especially if those activities can have a huge impact on the data you are collecting.
In science, we usually work with schedules and most of our field trips usually are planned ahead, however we cannot control weather and sometimes rains start before usual times and you need to be flexible to adjust to those climate patterns, especially now that rainy patterns are changing so much in unpredictable ways.
Other challenges include equipment damage because of humidity conditions on the field site or faulty equipment. Humidity is a big problem for most of the equipment we use and sometimes even if we carefully choose the brands and take care of equipment as much as possible, still can get wet inside. Therefore, is always useful to take some silica gel to put wet equipment inside a hermetic box or when you have difficulties to get it, some rice will also works to extract humidity, from cameras, GPS, binoculars and camera traps. It is also wise to check your equipment before going to the field to avoid taking faulty equipment to field sites.
However, even when you plan, check your equipment before going to the field or when you can delegate, it is sometimes difficult to face some of those challenges and it is up to us to maintain a flexible mind to face those challenges to do our sampling, even when it seems we don-t have the skills and tools to solve it.
If you want to support our activities, please visit https://fineartamerica.com/art/xyomara+carretero or get in contact with us at xcarretero@gmail.com if you want to collaborate, donate or volunteer in our activities
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In today’s post we are talking about camera trap surveys, some of the wonders and challenges of working with this incredible technology. Camera traps had made easier to witness some behaviors that otherwise will be so difficult to see, especially for species that are naturally shy. It also had made possible to discover new locations for some species that we though weren’t able to inhabit those areas.
Don’t get me wrong, I started doing behavior in the old way, with binoculars at hand and following monkeys all day long, and still enjoy that part. However, camera traps can help with animals of nocturnal habits that are difficult to follow or behaviors that are rare and not commonly seen.
It is surprising the number of behaviors that you can discover using camera traps, from giant ant eaters taking a bath or discovering that crab-eating racoons are more common that you thought in your study area. Or finding out that huron or grison are also found in small gallery forest fragments.
However, there is a lot of challenges, not only to find the right kind of camera trap to use, where to located it and make sure that the camera trap you choose is resistant to humidity, and even to battery explosions due to excess of heat!!!!
In tropical forest humidity is a big challenge that not always is easy to sort out, and sometimes in areas where you have high humidity at sometimes in the year while at other times you have high temperatures and very dry air, make difficult to choose the right kind of camera and not always you make the right decisions. Balancing cost of cameras and resistance to humidity and high temperatures is not easy and sometimes means a lot of trial and error.
If you want to support our activities, please visit https://fineartamerica.com/art/xyomara+carretero or get in contact with as at xcarretero@gmail.com if you want to collaborate, donate or volunteer in our activities
© Copyright Disclaimer. All pictures used on this web page are protected with copyrights to Xyomara Carretero-Pinzón. If you want to use any of these pictures, please leave a message on the website. Thank you.