Foraging animals continuously makes choices to balance hunger – the need to acquire food – and fear – the need to avoid predation. These choices are reflected in the level of foraging activity (rather than sheltering), the timing of foraging activity and the location of foraging. Greater perceived predation risk typically means that animals compromise on foraging. These so-called non-consumptive, indirect effects of predators can have profound consequences for the animal communities themselves as for the ecosystems in which they live.
The presence of people is known to induce similar responses of wildlife as the presence of top predators. This has raised the question to what degree leisure activities in protected areas affect the behaviour of wild animals. This question is gaining relevance in especially densely populated areas in the developed world, where the intensity at which protected areas are used by people is increasing.
Camera traps placed in habitats with different levels of foraging quality and safety are one way to record such responses. These cameras record foraging wildlife while passing in front of infrared sensors, and thus compile records of the time and location of activity which can be compared across situations.
National Park De Hoge Veluwe is a 54-km2 fenced protected area in the Netherlands that attracts more than 600.000 visitors annually. The park has strict opening hours that vary during the year, longer in the summer, shorter in the winters. The wildlife in the park – including Red deer, Mouflon, Roe deer and Wild boar – is believed to show strong responses to the visitors, avoiding exposed locations at busy times.
The park has 56-70 permanent camera traps that have been recording wildlife activity in six different major habitat types near-continuously for several years. Half of the cameras within each habitat are located within restricted areas, where no people are allowed. The other half in areas that were accessible to people until 2016, when off-trail hiking got forbidden. The cameras have captured hundreds of instances of wildlife passing, part of which have been classified to species.
The challenge is to explore patterns of activity in time (e.g. seasonal, daily) and space (e.g. across habitat types) at the Hoge Veluwe National Park, and determine whether and how these patterns are affected by the presence of visitors. You may also want to include climatic data in your analysis. There are a number of difficulties: