Turning Camera Traps Into Coexistence

By Amy Dickman, Alayne Cotterill, and Lily Maynard

Camera traps are often seen simply as an ecological monitoring tool, but in East Africa, we turned them into something much more: a direct route to improved coexistence between people and carnivores. 

Human-carnivore conflict is a major and growing threat, imposing significant costs on local people through attacks and fear, and causing high levels of wildlife killings. Most conservation programmes focus, understandably, on reducing the direct costs of conflict, for example, by helping safeguard livestock. However, reducing costs alone rarely tips the balance. Lasting coexistence requires wildlife being seen as a visible, tangible asset to people who live with them every day.

That is the premise behind Community Camera Trapping (CCT) and its expanded sibling, Community Camera Trapping Plus (CCT+), developed by Lion Landscapes with communities in Tanzania and now also operating in Kenya and Mozambique.

From Stolen Cameras to Shared Ownership

CCT began as a simultaneous fix to two problems. Firstly, we were providing community benefits, but as they were not directly tied to wildlife presence, killings remained high. Secondly, camera-traps placed for ecological monitoring were being stolen, as local people felt little engagement in their use. The solution - created during discussions with local people - was to hand the cameras, and the incentive structure, to communities themselves. Community members place and monitor the camera-traps, and every photographed animal earns points, weighted toward more threatened and more conflict-causing species: for example, a lion, African wild dog or hyaena generates more points than a small antelope. In an additional twist, an animal showing snare injuries earns nothing, while a collared research animal earns double points.

Community members setting up a camera trap

Points are tallied quarterly and converted into benefits the communities themselves choose, such as healthcare benefits, veterinary treatment, and school supplies. Results and benefits are displayed publicly, and every participating village receives something.

CCT+ builds directly on that foundation. Where CCT rewards wildlife presence, CCT+ also rewards human behaviour: a community earns additional points for actions like installing fortified-livestock enclosures, and loses points for actions like poisoning or snaring. A co-developed, written conservation agreement - reviewed and renewed annually - spells out exactly what counts, how it's measured, and what it's worth, with a benefit floor so no community is left with nothing, and a cap so the program stays budgetable.

Conservation and community impacts

Household surveys in southern Tanzania reveal the programme’s strength; since the programme began, more people want lion numbers to increase or stay the same, view nearby wildlife positively, and recognize personal benefits from the presence of wildlife, even potentially dangerous and costly species like lions.

Behaviour has shifted too: communities have reinforced livestock enclosures, reported conflict incidents promptly, and in some cases have actively protected high-value species, from tolerating breeding lion prides on village land to releasing a captured pangolin because it was worth more to the village alive in the wild than sold for illegal trade.

Crucially, CCT+ doesn't require communities to hold formal rights over wildlife, only proximity to it, and it uses existing local governance structures for decision-making. Costs and rewards are shared, transparent, and adaptable - and while it is not perfect, this structure enables it to change and keep enabling coexistence even as circumstances change.

CCT+ benefits distribution to the community: veterinary medicine given to pastoralists

An Invitation to AZA Partners: Scaling up through AZA SAFE African Lion

This year's SAFE African Lion campaign invites AZA-accredited institutions to help strengthen and scale this innovative programme. Lion Landscapes has had interest from around the world in how other conservation groups could use the community camera-trapping approach for other crucially important landscapes and species. 

Through SAFE African Lion, AZA member institutions can help in three ways: 

1. Supporting CCT+ in current landscapes.

2. Helping Lion Landscapes enable a ‘Conservation Payments Coalition’ to share information with other interested groups. 

3. Assisting in identifying high-priority conservation partner projects where this initiative could be tested and expanded in future.

For AZA members already investing in in situ carnivore conservation, CCT+ offers a model with a proven track record, transparent enough for communities, donors and zoo visitors, and flexible enough to trial in contexts very different from the East African rangelands where it was developed. This SAFE African Lion partnership is a chance to see how this approach could strengthen your own field partnerships, and to help write the next chapter of what community-driven coexistence can look like.

One of the community members posing with health insurance card, one of the CCT+ benefits

To learn more about partnering with Lion Landscapes on CCT+ with SAFE African Lion, contact the SAFE Program Leader, Dr. Lily Maynard, lily.maynard@cincinnatizoo.org.

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This blog was first published on the AZA Connect magazine website.