BoomBox attaches to a camera trap to create an Automated Behavioural Response (ABR) system for wildlife research and conservation.
An Automated Behavioural Response system (ABRs) is a remote playback system that uses camera traps to record animal responses to predetermined stimuli, such as audio cues.
This novel tool blends the benefits of camera trapping, such as continuous monitoring of entire wildlife communities, the generation of large datasets and lack of human observers, with the power of playback experiments, such as being able to directly test behavioural responses to establish strong mechanistic inference.
ABRs’ opens up new research questions and conservation applications. They can be used to study wildlife responses to anthropogenic disturbances, explore species interactions and coexistence including predator/prey dynamics, and understand reactions to conspecifics, prey, novel stimuli, or human activity. More recently ABRs’s have been used as non-lethal pest deterrents. Click here for some experiment ideas and applications, or here for some of the publications and papers using ABRs.
The first ABR system was developed in 2016 by Justin Suraci et. al. Building upon this work, the first BoomBox was developed in 2019 by Freaklabs and Meredith Palmer.
BoomBox ABRs continues to develop, incorporating new features and modalities and ABRs research and applications have grown.
For more information on ABR, also check out the research site of Dr. Liana Zanette & Dr. Michael Clinchy at Western University, London ON Canada
If you don’t hear anything, please check your audio volume.
The reaction of a spectator bird to a lion audio cue. Footage from the BoomBox ABR system.