Camera-Trap 'By-Catch' Sheds New Light on Borneo's Elusive Civets
A young researcher is turning overlooked wildlife footage into fresh insights on how Bornean viverrids share their habitat.
Photographs captured almost by accident are helping to reveal the hidden lives of Borneo's civets.
In a new Meet the Researcher blog, Keyana Grace of the Civet Project Foundation, an Ecoflix partner, shares her work on the ecology of Viverridae, the family that includes civets.
Her research forms part of a Master's degree in Wildlife Conservation.
Grace has been examining camera-trap "by-catch" — the images of non-target species that surveys record alongside the animals they were set up to study.
Rather than setting such footage aside, she is using it to explore how Bornean viverrids divide up their environment, a process known as niche partitioning.
Understanding how these species coexist can tell conservationists a great deal about the health of a forest and the needs of its more secretive residents.
Civets are often difficult to observe in the wild, which makes every reliable record valuable.
By making fuller use of data that already exists, the approach offers an efficient way to learn more about these little-studied mammals.
The work also highlights the role of early-career researchers in filling gaps in our knowledge of tropical wildlife.
You can watch the story of the Civet Project's research through Ecoflix.