21 THE RAFFLES BULLETIN OF ZOOLOGY 2013 CAMERA TRAPPING FOR THE STUDY AND CONSERVATION OF TROPICAL CARNIVORES Sunarto Department of Fish & Wildlife Conservation, Virginia Tech, 100 Cheatham Hall, Blacksburg, VA 24061-0321, USA WWF-Indonesia, Graha Simatupang, Jl. TB. Simatupang No. 38, Tower 2 Unit C, Jakarta 12540, Indonesia Email: s.sunarto@yahoo.com (Corresponding author) Rahel Sollmann Department of Forestry and Environmental Resources, North Carolina State University, Box 7646, Turner House, Raleigh, NC 27695-8003, USA Azlan Mohamed WWF-Malaysia, 49, Jalan SS 23/15, Taman SEA, 47400, Petaling Jaya Selangor, Malaysia Institute for Tropical Biology and Conservation, Universiti Malaysia Sabah, 88999 Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia Marcella J. Kelly Department of Fish & Wildlife Conservation, Virginia Tech, 100 Cheatham Hall, Blacksburg, VA 24061-0321, USA ABSTRACT. — Past studies on tropical carnivores and other secretive animals relied on indirect evidence of animal presence such as tracks, scats, or scrapes. While such evidence can be useful for basic studies, using remotely-triggered camera traps offer researchers more reliable evidence of animal presence and, with appropriate study design and analysis, provides an array of opportunities to investigate carnivore ecology. We present an overview on camera trap uses for the study and conservation of wildlife, with a particular focus on tropical carnivores. Our goals are to promote proper and effective application of camera trapping and related analyses. We highlight major research avenues, give relevant examples and lessons learned from published material and from our own experiences, and review available resources for implementation, from preparation and camera trap field set up, to data management, analysis, and presentation of results. Our review considers sampling design with respect to target species or groups of species, the state variable(s) of interest, what constitutes a sample, sample size needed, collection of supporting data (independent variables), reducing bias/minimising error, and data collection schedule. We also highlight some available camera trap database management packages and available statistical packages to analyse camera trapping data. We discuss presenting findings to a wider audience so results become useful in the conservation and management of species. Finally, we discuss future development of camera trapping technology and related techniques for the study and conservation of carnivores in the tropics. KEY WORDS. — camera trapping review, elusive carnivores, photographic sampling, predator, wildlife research in the tropics THE RAFFLES BULLETIN OF ZOOLOGY 2013 Supplement No. 28: 21–42 http://zoobank.org/urn:lsid:zoobank.org:pub:804A6DC9-A92A-41AE-A820-F3DA48614761 Date of Publication: 27 Nov.2013 © National University of Singapore INTRODUCTION Tropical carnivore ecologists often receive questions about the number of times they have directly observed the animals they study in the wild. Typically, the answer to such questions is “hardly ever” or “never”. Past studies on tropical carnivores and many other secretive animals relied on indirect evidence of animal presence such as tracks, scats, or scrapes, which can be useful for simple distribution mapping. However, relatively recent techniques using camera traps offer researchers more reliable evidence of animal presence. Moreover, standardising effort and sampling protocol is relatively easy to do in camera trapping; and there is plenty of room for improvement in the study design and analysis, allowing more thorough investigation of carnivore ecology. Tropical rainforest carnivores have characteristics that make camera traps an ideal study tool. These characteristics include their body size (medium or large), morphology (natural marks for individual identification), guild/habitat in which they live (terrestrial—allowing for relatively simple placement of equipment), behaviour (readily use trails), secretiveness/ elusiveness (difficult to study with other methods; Griffiths & Schaick, 1993; Karanth et al., 2004b), rarity (requiring large survey effort; Goldman & Winther-Hansen, 2003; Wibisono & Mccarthy, 2010), activity patterns (often nocturnal and