Overcoming the distance estimation bottleneck in estimating animal abundance with camera traps

The biodiversity crisis is still accelerating, despite increasing efforts by the international community. Estimating animal abundance of critical importance to assess, for example, consequences land-use change and invasive species on community composition, or effectiveness conservation interventions. Various approaches have been developed estimate unmarked populations. Whereas these differ in methodological details, they all require estimation effective area surveyed front a camera trap. Until now camera-to-animal distance measurements are derived laborious, manual subjective methods. To overcome this bottleneck, study proposes an automatized pipeline utilizing monocular depth image calibration We able reduce effort required factor greater than 21 provide our system at https://timm.haucke.xyz/publications/distance-estimation-animal-abundance