Shoot the Amazon

Executive summary: Mass produce cheap, remotely-addressable camera traps using mostly-standard cheap cellphone parts. Drop thousands in remote areas. --------

The more jungular parts of the world are host to a huge diversity of animals, and most of them are under-explored. A fair proportion of explorations in the more remote areas turn up new species of mammals and birds, as well as many smaller species.

A common strategy for these explorations is to leave camera traps (motion-activated cameras) in likely areas for a few nights, and then go back to retrieve the images. This is a very effective way of surveying the wildlife, and has quite often led to the initial identification of new species.

However, camera traps are expensive, and have to be set and revisited.

Given the cheapness of modern electronics, it should be possible to produce a small camera trap in large numbers, for a few pounds each. It needs to have a camera (obviously) - but cellphone camera modules can be bought in bulk for very low prices. It also needs some memory to store the images, and an infra-red sensor to trigger it when a warm-blooded animal passes by. For night photography, it also needs an infra-red LED flash to illuminate animals.

I'd also like these cheap camera traps to have the ability to transmit images wirelessly over a distance of maybe 500m or so. It might be cheapest to do this using mobile phone technology, or some other short-range radio transmitter might do the job. It should be possible, from a few hundred metres away, to ask the camera trap if it has any images and, if so, to upload those images.

Finally, I want these traps to have a small, cheap solar cell. There's not much light in the jungly jungle, but there should be enough to trickle-charge a battery, even if it's only enough for a few photos per day.

Post-finally, each camera is going to have a long ribbon tied to it. I'll get back this point.

Now, if these things were made in large numbers, I think they could be made cheaply. After all, we can make single-use digital cameras that are cheap enough to throw away.

So, we make maybe a few thousand of these things. We then fly over an interesting bit of jungle, and drop them at intervals of a couple of hundred metres. Each camera will drop, trailing its ribbon. Most of the cameras will snag, by their ribbons, in trees or undergrowth, where they will dangle happily (and right way up). A proportion will make it to the jungle floor, and some clever design will ensure that many of these land right way up. Overall, maybe half of these cameras will land in a position to take photos.

A week, or a month, or a year later we fly over the same area. Gadgetry on the plane polls each of the cameras in turn, uploads any images they have caught, and asks them to erase the images to free up their memory. We can do this as often as we want, until the cameras eventually die.

The result will be a huge number of images. Many will show nothing (since the IR sensors on the cameras may respond to moving branches or whatever); most of the remainder will show known species of birds and mammals. But, based on the results from conventional camera traps, it's likely that a very small proportion (but a large number) of these images will show tantalising images of new species.

Another application of this would be to look for my favourite probably-extinct animal - the thylacine. There are sporadic and unconfirmed sightings of this animal still, in parts of Tasmania and Western Australia, but the areas are so vast and remote that thorough searches are impractical. Camera- bombing these areas with a few thousand cheap, remotely- addressable camera traps would be interesting.