100,000 observations of mammals and birds published

by Carla Avolio, Max Planck Society
November 6, 2026

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.”

Keep reading: https://www.mpg.de/27069395/100-000-observations-of-mammals-and-birds-published

Read the Ecology paper: https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecy.70516