Durham wildlife photography project wins national award

A project powered by volunteers which uses wildlife photography on a grand scale has won a national award.

MammalWeb - established in 2013 in collaboration between Durham University and Durham Wildlife Trust - has landed the National Biodiversity Network (NBN) Group Award 2024. Contributors’ camera traps have so far captured 2.3 million classified image sequences and videos, of which more than 700,000 are mammal detections.

This supports future research and conservation while also helping to inform policy decisions that affect wildlife.

Camera traps are deployed by volunteers to capture images of wildlife and the resultant pictures are uploaded to MammalWeb where they are then classified online, either by the people who set up the camera traps (‘trappers’) or by other participants (‘spotters’).

MammalWeb integrates AI and machine-learning to help process the huge numbers of images captured, filtering out images of humans and false triggers - containing no wildlife) - so that efforts can be focussed on those likely to contain animals. The images provide benefits ranging from increasing understanding of the ecology of species and their responses to current environmental changes, to planning the development of infrastructure and managing wildlife disease.

Prof Philip Stephens, founding director of MammalWeb, in the Department of Biosciences, Durham University, said: “We’re a huge community of enthusiasts, with a great range of motivations. The main thing that unites us is a fascination for the wild mammals around us. Although they are mostly elusive and secretive, we love the insights we can gain through the use of camera traps, giving us glimpses into their distribution, abundance and behaviours, and assisting with their conservation.

“This award is fabulous recognition of the huge efforts of thousands of committed volunteers who help to collect footage of our wild mammals, to tell us what’s pictured in that footage, or both. Those efforts, in turn, bear witness to the passionate concern felt by so many that we should all play our part in trying to avert the biodiversity crisis unfolding in Britain, as elsewhere.”

The NBN awards recognise and celebrate the outstanding contributions made to wildlife recording and data sharing, which is helping to improve understanding of the UK’s biodiversity and assisting conservation efforts.

In the last year 3,509 spotters took part and this year and 190 camera trappers. Its mission is to address the lack of information about wild mammals through citizen science. To join MammalWeb, contact info@mammalweb.org.