Global Camera Trapping Inventory (GCTI) v1.0: A global inventory of camera trapping studies for spatial biodiversity analysis

Camera trapping technology has significantly advanced the monitoring of medium- and large-sized animals’ biodiversity worldwide. However, the lack of data sharing in the camera trapping community, especially early on, has impeded the publicly accessible species records and limited the potential for large scale spatial analysis of global camera trapping data. Concerns over the threatened species further constrained data sharing. To address this gap, we present Global Camera Trapping Inventory (GCTI) v1.0, a global inventory of WOS- and CNKI-indexed camera trapping studies from 1990 to 2023 that compiles the geographic shape files extracted from 970 published studies. The inventory includes an Excel spreadsheet with 22 columns detailing research methods, recorded species and other attributes. It also contains three types of shapefiles that record geographic location information. GCTI was established to foster a collaborative atmosphere of open data sharing in biodiversity monitoring. The spatial data it provides, specific to regions and species, holds significant potential for advancing biodiversity conservation, ecology, and biogeography research. In comparison to existing databases such as Wildlife Insights and eMammal, GCTI offers shapefiles at the project level, making it especially suitable for conducting meta-analyses, literature reviews, and spatial overlap studies with global biodiversity datasets like GBIF and IUCN Red list. To facilitate its application, we developed a user-friendly website for searching, visualizing, and downloading data online (https://biodiversityoptimization.shinyapps.io/gcti_v1/).