Monitoring Island Spotted Skunks on Santa Cruz Island

The island spotted skunk is a rare California carnivore distributed throughout the California Channel Islands. Students and mentors in the UCSB-Smithsonian Scholars program work with partners at The Nature Conservancy to collect images of skunks using motion activated camera traps. As interns, scholars work directly with the Smithsonian Data Science Lab to automate data management and accelerate the use of these images using machine learning.

Image Data Management

Our project aims to follow the Camtrap Data Package data exchange format for camera trap data. Workflow details, documentation for data management, and machine learning applications are explained at the following links:

• Workflow
• Data Management Scripts
• Machine Learning