CamDo customer Billy Heaney, a student at the University of Exeter is studying the ecology of grey seals using remote sensing techniques. He's using a CamDo time lapse set-up (Dry Enclosure, Programmable Scheduler & V44 Wh External Battery) to monitor the haul-out use of grey seals on a beach on the North Coast of Cornwall. The time lapse controller is programmed to take a photograph at five minute intervals during daylight hours to build up knowledge of how many seals are using the beach throughout days, seasons, years etc. Here's a few images of the set-up:
The count data that is obtained from the time-lapse is then being statistically tested against environmental variables such as tide and temperature, with the intention of determining what influences the seals to/not to haul-out. The overall aim is to build up a 24 hour cycle of the grey seal haul-out using both daylight time-lapse and thermal infrared night surveys.
"In previous years we have used camera traps to collect our data with the same programming but found that they were not resilient enough to our Cornish weather, hence why we have purchased a CamDo solution to try and overcome this." - Billy Heaney
Here's some of his time lapse footage of the location:
New #seal time-lapse camera is fully operational @mjwitt1 @DrLucyHawkes @TonyBicknell @Cam_Do_ #FieldWorkProgress pic.twitter.com/5bGm6K74yw
— Billy Heaney (@BillyHeaney) July 28, 2016
To follow Heaney’s research endeavors, follow him on twitter (his pictures are pretty incredible)! Products used:
- Dry Enclosure
- Programmable Scheduler (this product has been discontinued and replaced with Blink)
- V44 Wh External Battery
DON'T BE SHY... SEND US YOUR FOOTAGE!
Have you used our products for one of your time lapse projects? Send it our way at marketing@cam-do.com. We might even feature it on our website or blog (with your permission, of course). With so many applications (and so many creative CamDo customers), it's great to show how our customers are utilizing CamDo Solutions products.
