The central study area of the IZW Cheetah Research Project is situated east and northeast of Namibia’s capital Windhoek and covers an area of approximately 40.000 km². Nearly every square meter is utilized by commercial farmers, who mainly conduct cattle breeding. In 2020, the CRP is again running a comprehensive camera trap survey in this area employing camera traps to gain insights into the behaviour of the cheetahs and to estimate their density.
“We placed, and will continue to place, camera traps in 15 different areas equally distributed within the entire study area”, CRP veterinarian Rebekka Müller explains. “The cameras trap stations are situated at marking trees of cheetahs. In each of the 15 areas we monitor 10 marking trees, using 2 camera traps per tree, for 28 days.” The camera traps detect movements from cheetahs, but of course also from all other wildlife species and livestock visiting the marking trees, as well as from moving vegetation. Given this, the CRP scientists receive between 14.000 and 140.000 photographs from each of the 15 areas.
“Since every cheetah living in the area will sooner or later visit these marking trees, we gain detailed information on the density of cheetahs and on their behaviour at the tree”, says Müller. “Owing to our repeated camera trap surveys in the past couple of years, we can compare the results with the latest ones and identify trends in the cheetah population.” The 2020 camera trap survey started in June and will be finished by the end of November. This is when Müller and her colleagues will start evaluating the data and acquire new valuable insights into the behaviour of the cheetahs as well as the foundation for new density estimates.
For more information on this research topic within the CRP, visit the sub-projects “Spatial ecology and distribution of free-ranging cheetahs” and “Camera trapping and density estimation”.