This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Every autumn for the last five years, hundreds of volunteers have set out remotely triggered cameras in mountains, forests, farms and beaches in more than 20 countries in Europe. Their joint project is called Snapshot Europe, and it's the largest open-access survey of mammals and birds across an entire continent.
Snapshot Europe was launched in 2021 by the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany and Euromammals to enable large-scale monitoring of birds and mammals beyond Europe's national borders. Because data collection is standardized and the results are made publicly available, Snapshot Europe is building a dataset that can help answer questions about biodiversity, human disturbance and how to conserve animals that live across multiple countries. The Snapshot Europe team has just published the first two years of data, which included 100,000 observations of mammals and birds in over 1,000 locations across Europe.
"We have breathtaking images of wildlife from Alpine landscapes to Spanish beaches to the hills of Ireland," says Fabiola Iannarilli, who is Snapshot Europe's scientific coordinator and first author of the study published in Ecology. "This diversity is rarely captured in one public dataset, so Snapshot Europe is a unique source of information to tackle big questions at a continental scale." The natural world is undergoing rapid change, and European landscapes are no exception. "Some species, like the wolf, are rebounding from the brink of extinction, while some exotic imports, like the raccoon, are spreading quickly," says Iannarilli, who is a scientist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior.
Understanding processes at continental scales is challenging, particularly in regions like Europe, where wild species live across national borders and are managed under different legislative frameworks. Nobody has the complete picture. "Data are often not publicly shared, and even when they are, they might be hard to find, they differ in format, and critical information might be missing," she says.
To address this need, Iannarilli and colleagues launched Snapshot Europe as an offshoot of Snapshot USA, which began in 2019. To build a network of experts across Europe, the project had help. Euromammals, whose members work on the spatial ecology and management of mammals around Europe, jump-started the initiative.
"I was immediately impressed by the incredible potential of this initiative. By leveraging the established and extensive Euromammals network, we could reach out to dozens of potential collaborators," says Francesca Cagnacci, Euromammals coordinator and senior author on the paper. In a few months, Snapshot Europe had collaborators providing data from 22 countries.
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