Ann Smithson spent hours as a child frolicking and having fun at Laurel Street Park in Belhaven.Now, she is part of a project to map the armadillo, raccoon, gray fox, red fox, white-tailed deer and other wildlife whose images are captured by a trail camera at the park.
“It puts it into perspective how we’re living our day to day lives in the city and so are the animals,” she said. “We’ve got our routines and so do they.”
Smithson, who graduated from St. Andrew’s Episcopal School and earned a bachelor’s degree in international development with a minor in environmental science from Washington University in 2018, is helping spread the word that volunteers are needed for the Jackson Urban Wildlife Monitoring Project that keeps up with the animals that inhabit more than 40 greenspaces in the metro area.
So far, the project has detected 17 species that include the armadillo, the Eastern gray squirrel, the fox squirrel, the Southern flying squirrel, the white-tailed deer, raccoons, the Virginia opossum, the Eastern cottontail rabbit and nutria.
The red fox, the gray fox, the North American river otter, the Canada goose, wild turkey, the striped skunk and various domestic dogs and cats have also turned up on field cameras.
Mississippi State University Extension created the project in 2019 in conjunction with the Urban Wildlife Information Network in Chicago and 53 other partner cities around the world. The project is tied in with Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago and in Mississippi has numerous partners at MSU along with federal and state agencies and public and private landowners.
“We’re looking at basic urban wildlife ecology questions, how various wildlife species respond to human activities,” said Adam Rohnke, Ph.D., assistant extension professor and wildlife specialist at the Central Mississippi Research and Extension Center in Raymond.
The idea behind the project is to build the largest global network for collecting urban wildlife data. Understanding how animals adapt to and inhabit urban areas is critical to preserving and maintaining biodiversity and issues that arise from how humans and wildlife interact in shared urban spaces, he said.
In the metro area, 43 sites ranging from city-owned parks to cemeteries that are located from downtown Jackson to just shy of Gluckstadt and from just outside Clinton to just outside of Brandon are sites where trail cameras, standard Bushnell cameras encased in security boxes, are placed each spring, summer, fall and winter for a month to capture images of animals that pass by.
“We have permission from the landowners to put the cameras out where we do,” Rohnke said. “We put them in spots specifically as random as we can but away from walking trails and playgrounds, anywhere where youth are. One reason for that is for privacy concerns and the other is we’re identifying mammals and critters who walk in front of the cameras and trying to reduce the number of triggers in terms of humans.
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“We put the cameras at waist height and angle them downward. If someone walks in front of one of the cameras, we get an image of someone from the waist down and not a face.”
Jamie Fowler Boyll Park, Chastain Middle School, Greenwood Cemetery, Laurel Street Park, LeFleur’s Bluff State Park, Manhattan Park, Millsaps College, Parham Bridges Park, Smith Park and Tougaloo Park are some of the locations in Jackson.
In Ridgeland, the greenspaces include Friendship Park, Wolcott Park and Old Town Middle School. In Madison, Liberty Park, Madison Avenue Elementary School, Madison Crossing Elementary School and Natchez Trace Memorial Park are part of the project. Both the Natchez Trace Parkway East and the Natchez Trace Parkway West are, too.
“We work with parks and recreation department folks across Jackson,” Rohnke said. “We have working relationships with all of them. We also work with school districts, and we have several partner homeowner associations with green spaces within their neighborhoods that we work with.”
Additional homeowner associations and neighborhoods are needed that would allow cameras to be posted on greenspace, he said.
So far, about $20,000 has been invested in cameras, security cases, rechargeable batteries and data storage cards for the project. “We lost some cameras in a flash flood but haven’t had much of a theft issue, which was a big concern,” Rohnke said.
The cameras generate a staggering number of images, on average 12,000 to 15,000 images a season, he said. Two individuals, often volunteers, independently of each other look at and organize the images and add pertinent information. Rohnke makes the final call if there’s a dispute about what species an image shows.
“We’re 18 months in arrears,” Rohnke said. “We’re going through images from 2022. We won’t process images from 2024 until the end of this year or early next year. We’ve got 40,000, 50,000 images waiting to be processed.”
Here’s a sampling of the data for the locations in the Belhaven neighborhood and nearby. Since 2019, a camera at Laurel Street Park has had 173 detections with 11 species while LeFleur’s Bluff State Park has had 494 detections and 12 species seen. Millsaps College has had 497 detections and 10 species seen.
Photos are highlighted on the project’s webpages and periodically shared on the Mississippi Master Naturalists Facebook page as well as in MSU Extension presentations.
Smithson, who taught English in Japan for two years after graduating from college and returned home after the global pandemic hit, landed her job with the project because of the geographic information system (GIS) knowledge she acquired as an undergraduate.
She uses technology such as StoryMaps and Experience Builder to create the project’s narrative webpages and interactive maps that provide information such as the different locations, number of species seen at each location and, thanks to the Mississippi State University Department of History, will include cultural information about each site.
“I’m not a biologist by training and don’t know much about the wildlife of Mississippi beyond deer and what you see on the side of the road,” said Smithson, an Extension associate. “It’s been a great way to learn more about the wildlife we have in Jackson in the places where we have cameras.
“It’s interesting to see what’s caught on camera. There was a series of photos where a cat was playing with a rodent. I’ve seen a white tail deer that sat in front of one of the cameras for a good hour, two hours.”
The project is ongoing with no end in sight, with its initial goal of showing how wildlife react to human actions, but that’s just the start. One study has focused on barriers to building wildlife-inclusive cities and includes insights from urban ecologists, urban planners and landscape designers, while other research centers on how wealth and urbanization shape medium and large terrestrial mammal communities.
“We’re expanding now and putting recorders out with the cameras that record ambient noise so we can look at how noise and light influence wildlife behavior,” Rohnke said.
As useful as the scientific data might be, the educational component is equally important. “It’s about getting people interested in parks again and learning about critters that inhabit them,” he said.
Smithson encourages individuals interested in the project to become Mississippi Master Naturalists, a program similar to its counterpart, Master Gardeners.
This year’s Master Naturalist program will be a combination of online and in-person training. It Is scheduled from May 17 through July 12. For more information about the program, go to https://masternaturalist.extension.msstate.edu/.
“We will have four field days around central Mississippi,” she said. “Lectures will be pre-recorded and available online to participants, released on a weekly basis.”
Smithson said volunteers with the Jackson Urban Wildlife Monitoring Project can be as involved as they would like. Some people want to go out in the field and set up the cameras. Others want to look at the images of the wildlife and help with that side of the project.
“It’s a great way to learn more about what’s in your backyard,” she said.
