100,000 Observations Of Mammals And Birds Published

Snapshot Europe Releases Largest Dataset to Date on Wildlife in Europe

To the Point

• Surveying a continent: Snapshot Europe is a continent-wide mammal survey conducted by a community of camera-trap experts who collect data for up to three months each year.
• Cameras collect data: In its first two years (2021-2022), Snapshot Europe collected 100,000 observations of mammals and birds from 1000 locations in over 20 European countries.
• Collaboration across sectors: Data were gathered by over 160 camera-trap experts from universities, national parks, museums, and conservation organizations.
• Answering big questions: Snapshot Europe data are standardized and publicly available, making it possible to understand and conserve European mammals and birds at the continental scale.

Every autumn for the last five years, hundreds of volunteers have set out remotely-triggered cameras in mountains, forests, farms, and beaches in over 20 countries in Europe. Their joint project is called Snapshot Europe, and it’s the largest open-access survey of mammals and birds across an entire continent.

Snapshot Europe was launched in 2021 by the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, Germany, and Euromammals to enable large-scale monitoring of birds and mammals beyond Europe’s national borders. Because data collection is standardized, and the results made publicly available, Snapshot Europe is building a dataset that can help answer questions about biodiversity, human disturbance, and how to conserve animals that live across multiple countries.

The Snapshot Europe team have just published the first two years of data, which included 100,000 observations of mammals and birds in over 1000 locations across Europe. “We have breathtaking images of wildlife from Alpine landscapes to Spanish beaches to the hills of Ireland,” says the study’s first author, Fabiola Iannarilli, who is the Snapshot Europe’s scientific coordinator.

“This diversity is rarely captured in one public dataset, so Snapshot Europe is a unique source of information to tackle big questions at a continental scale.”

How to capture a continent

The natural world is undergoing rapid change, and European landscapes are no exception. “Some species, like the wolf, are rebounding from the brink of extinction, while some exotic imports, like the racoon, are spreading quickly,” says Iannarilli, who is a scientist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior.

Understanding processes at continental scales is challenging, particularly in regions like Europe, where wild species live across national borders and are managed under different legislative frameworks. Nobody has the complete picture. “Data are often not publicly shared, and even when they are, they might be hard to find, they differ in format, and critical information might be missing,” she says.

To address this need, Iannarilli and colleagues launched Snapshot Europe as an offshoot of Snapshot USA, which began in 2019. To build a network of experts across Europe, the project had help. Euromammals, whose members work on the spatial ecology and management of mammals around Europe, jump-started the initiative.

“I was immediately impressed by the incredible potential of this initiative. By leveraging the established and extensive Euromammals network, we could reach out to dozens of potential collaborators,” says Francesca Cagnacci, Euromammals coordinator and senior author on the paper. In a few months, Snapshot Europe had collaborators providing data from 22 countries.

In total, more than 160 camera trap experts from 118 organizations contributed to the effort. They came from universities and research institutes, national parks and protected areas, museums, and several conservation organizations and foundations.

According to a standardized protocol, they set out cameras in wild places, cities, and parks, from August to November each year. The cameras, set-up around knee height, take a series of images when an infrared sensor detects movement. This non-invasive method captures photographs of a diversity of ground-dwelling species, from small rodents to brown bears.

The geographic coverage is diverse too. Around 1000 locations were sampled for Snapshot Europe each year, representing all ecoregions present in the European continent. The north-most records were from Sweden, where towering moose were photographed in the forests of Svartberget. In the southern end, red deer were caught strolling on the coastal dunes of Parque Nacional de Doñana in Spain.

At the end of the sampling period, the collaborators retrieve the cameras and upload all photographs to Wildlife Insights, a platform that centralizes and standardizes all Snapshot data. To speed up the workflow, a built-in AI model automatically identifies the animal in each image, and the collaborator checks and approves the assigned label.

The pulse of life in Europe

Once the data are in, the Snapshot Europe team prepare the results for publication. In the 2021-2022 paper, the team report that the species most frequently detected was the red deer, followed closely by roe deer. Other common species included wild boar, red fox, and European rabbit. Based on camera height and the animals’ high abundance, these species are expected to be most photographed, the authors write.

When countries were compared, Belgium had the highest number of daily observations, with European rabbits captured on camera up to ten times a day. But when it comes to diversity of wildlife, Parco Nazionale Casentino in Italy ranked highest of all, with 15 species documented by Snapshot Europe collaborators, from red deer and badgers to wolves and martens.

All images and accompanying data of Snapshot Europe are publicly available through the publication, which means that the global community of researchers and managers can address questions that would be hard to tackle without such large-scale dataset. “Already, collaborators are working on analyses based on this data, and in the next months and years we will be able to see the results of this effort,” says Iannarilli.

For example, the survey spotted northern raccoons in Germany, Italy, and the Czech Republic. Originally from North America, the species was imported in the 1920s for fur farming. “We can now contribute to a better understanding of the extent of racoon distribution in its non-native range,” says Iannarilli.

With the first two years of data published, the team are now compiling the results from 2023 to 2025. Repeating Snapshot Europe year after year will allow comparisons across time, building a picture of how wild populations across Europe are changing.

A global view

The benefits that come from this initiative are now spreading across the world. Snapshot Global was recently created to survey regions across the world using the same standardized camera trap sampling protocol.

Roland Kays, from North Carolina State University and Museum of Natural Sciences, who is a co-author of the publication and was part of the team that launched the first Snapshot initiative in the USA, says: “Snapshot Europe showed us that this model to monitor wildlife was transferable past the USA, and their success inspired new programs in Japan, Brazil, Chile and Paraguay. With even more countries joining this year, we are excited to see the blossoming of the Snapshot Global community.”