Congo Basin’s Hidden Wildlife
Cameras in the Democratic Republic of Congo track 47 mammal species across forest levels.
鶹Ů researchers and collaborators used vertically stacked infrared camera traps to monitor mammals from the forest floor to the canopy in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Published in the Journal of Mammalogy, the researchers identified 47 mammal taxa, including eight outside their previously documented ranges. The cameras revealed how species use different forest levels, capturing intriguing behaviors including bats approaching other mammals. The cameras revealed a strongly stratified community.
A second study published in ECOLOGY, found that including all three forest levels revealed relationships between mammal occupancy and elevation that were missed by conventional surveys. Together, the studies show how surveying wildlife from the forest floor to the canopy can strengthen conservation by revealing important habitat, threatened species and how animals respond to changes in their environment.
“The cameras essentially gave us a way to turn a single point in the forest into a vertical column of observation” said Daniel Alempijevic, Ph.D., lead author of the Journal of Mammalogy study and 鶹Ů alumnus. “We could put one camera facing the ground, one just a few meters higher in a tangle of vines, and a third 20 to 30 meters up in a tree crown, and then watch what was happening across those layers simultaneously. It was particularly fascinating to see how related species shared the same space. At the Bartho survey site, we found at least 10 species of primates; and probably the first camera trap recording ever captured of the enigmatic black-bellied pangolin back in 2016. This is the first study to get three species of pangolins within a single survey, which is really amazing.”