The use of camera traps in ecological research and monitoring has grown exponentially over the past decade and has become the preferred method for studying rare and elusive terrestrial birds and mammals. Increasingly camera trap monitoring programs are used by wildlife and protected area managers on public and private lands to inform management decisions. Presently, most camera trap programs are collecting data at the wildlife community level but only analyzing small portions of the data collected. The by-catch data are usually filed away unanalyzed and there has been no easy way to organize and share camera trap data across unconnected programs and projects.

The Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring Network (TEAM) is the first global monitoring network using camera traps to monitor birds and mammals in tropical forests. The TEAM Network provides a suite of tools to facilitate the collection, management, storage, and sharing of camera trap data. The TEAM Network is building standardized wildlife monitoring solutions applicable to an individual protected area to sub-national, national and regional levels.

An offshoot of TEAM is Wildlife Insights: The Camera Trap Data Network (WI). WI will soon launch a website to facilitate management, storage, and analysis of camera trap data for all scientists, and natural resource managers who want to engage in a community that shares their data through open access. WI will serve as a portal for a federated database comprising the TEAM Network data, eMammal data, WI data, and other online websites that might wish to join the data federation. WI is a cloud-based system that will allow users to share, access, and analyze millions of camera trap images and related data including a variety of other environmental and climate data sources. The TEAM Network and WI provide analytical tools that range from simple data summaries to more complex analytics, such as the Wildlife Picture Index, which will enable land use managers insight into the status of terrestrial vertebrate wildlife populations. The camera trap minimum data (CTMD) standard defines the exchange format for many of these tools. Integration of the CTMD with other standards (e.g., Audubon Core, Federal Geographic Data Committee Biological Data Profile, Ecological Metadata Language, etc.) will further enable data exchange and documentation.