🛰️Are wireless camera traps right for you?
Wireless camera traps are generally more expensive than traditional, SD-card based camera traps (in some cases >2x the cost) and can be more cumbersome to install, so it's worth evaluating whether this technology is a good fit for your use-case. The first step is understanding the benefits that wireless wildlife cameras provide.
Benefits of wireless camera traps
Real-time data
Since camera traps were invented, over 100 years ago, the literal nuts and bolts of camera traps have evolved - they are now digital, passive infrared motion sensors have replaced silk tripwires, and it’s all become vastly cheaper and more accessible. But fundamentally, the practice of camera trapping has remained the same. You go out into the field, you set up your camera, you let it sit there for a long time and collect data, and then you go back out into the field (often months later) to retrieve the images it captured.
Wireless camera traps, on the other hand, offer a different paradigm: because they send a stream of images to the cloud in near-real-time, and because many of them can be powered from solar panels, you don't need to return to the camera to fetch the data, and you can access the images from anywhere with internet as soon as they were taken.
Real-time data means that you can respond to and act on that data, if need be, much, much faster than traditional camera traps. For certain use-cases in which response time is critical, like responding to an invasive species incursion or mitigating human-wildlife conflict, access to real-time data can have profound advantages and potentially help avert expensive and ecologically devastating outcomes.
Maintenance savings
Regardless of whether or not real-time images are important for your use-case, the fact that you don't have to return to the cameras virtually at all until you're ready to take them down means that you don't need to spend nearly as much time in the field servicing the cameras. We have cameras that have been siting out in the field for many years and are have been operating non-stop without any upkeep or intervention.
If the cameras are in hard-to-access locations, the maintenance time savings alone might warrant the use of wireless cameras and could offset the added cost of the hardware.
Also, a good amount of the maintenance can be done without leaving your house: because the communication between the cameras and the users is often bi-directional, you can typically configure settings, get status reports, and manually trigger the cameras all remotely. So if you notice that a camera is firing too much during certain hours or is over exposed at night, you can adjust those settings right from your computer.
The efficiency gains in upkeep and maintenance translate directly to a smaller boots-on-the-ground footprint for running these cameras, and thus a greater potential for scalability - both in terms of the numbers of cameras you can operate at a given time, and also in terms of how far-afield, and how remote, you can comfortably deploy them.
More data, better data
With the SD-card based camera trap workflow, you set up your camera, say a little prayer, and then come back many weeks or months later hoping that your camera didn’t get knocked over, a patch of grass didn't shoot up and obscure the frame, and the batteries didn’t get depleted because some leaves were blowing around in the background. All of this happens quite frequently and can severely impact the quality and quantity of the images you collect.
But with wireless cameras and access to real-time images, you know right away when something goes wrong, so you can be more targeted with your maintenance efforts, and if you address those issues quickly, you end up with much more usable data, for less effort and less time.
On Santa Cruz Island, fore example, we found that that with our previous SD-card based cameras we had been losing >10% of our monitoring days due to SD card or battery malfunctions alone.
Use-case considerations
Given the strengths outlined above, we typically recommend wireless camera traps for projects in which one or more of the following applies:
Real-time data matters - you could use insights derived from camera data to take action or intervene in some way, and those interventions are time-sensitive
long-term deployments - the longer the cameras are out in the field, the more the maintenance efficiency gains offset the the added cost and setup complexity of the wireless cameras
hard-to-access locations - servicing the cameras is costly and time consuming
existing internet connectivity or cell service - without at least one point of existing internet connectivity in your area of study or reliable cell service, wireless camera networks require satellite and become either more expensive to install or more limited in utility. You can read more about connectivity considerations in Types of wireless camera traps.
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