Landowners in Vilas and Price counties who would like to play an important role in wildlife management, and have some fun doing it, are encouraged to check out Snapshot Wisconsin.
Snapshot Wisconsin is a volunteer based monitoring effort to capture images of all types of wildlife including deer, elk, bears, fox, bobcats, whooping cranes and more. The goal is to provide information to a wildlife database. The project is led by the DNR in partnership with the University of Wisconsin-Madison and UW-Extension.
The DNR's Susan Frett is project coordinator....
"....we supply trail cameras and other needed equipment to volunteers to put cameras out for us to do wildlife monitoring. We're targeting private land right now and we're looking for volunteers that have at least 10 acres and are willling to host a camera on their private land for at least a year...."
Vilas and Price counties are areas enrolled this year. Oneida county was enrolled one year ago.
Frett says while the project is fun for the property owner, it provides a valuable service to biologists at the DNR...
"...we get the great photos and we like to use those for outreach and talking to the public about the project. What's really great about the photos is once they're classified we can use those as data. We're already starting to use the information. One of the first results was helping to figure out the elk population where elk had been reintroduced. We used the cameras for that....."
Frett says besides Wisconsin volunteers, more than 5,000 volunteers from around the world are participating in crowd-sourced classification of our images at.snapshotwisconsin.org.
More information is available by going to the DNR website and putting 'Snapshot Wisconsin' in the search box.
