In search of the Virginia Gray Fox

You never want to lose biodiversity in an ecosystem and gray foxes are part of the ecosystem here in Virginia. What's interesting is we have about 20 years of anecdotal evidence suggesting they've been declining in Virginia, but we don't have a baseline data set of where they were historically in the past. So that is why this project's trying to figure out where they are now and then use data that we have from prior projects across the state citizen science research kind of anywhere we can get data from to see where they were in the past and to compare if there has been a shift in how gray foxes are using the habitat. We're using remote cameras so we set up trail cameras we leave them out for about six weeks and they take photos They're motion-activated and they stay active 24-7 for that six-week period. We go out to the field site and we look for kind of the best path of least resistance for an animal to travel along. And then we'll target that with our cameras. We'll put that on there in hopes that if the foxes are there, that we will actually get a photograph of them. Gray foxes are generally well-liked. They're also quite unique. They fall in this meso-carnivore, so in-between carnivore. they're not a big one but they're not a real tiny one either and so they kind of fill this this niche of being kind of an in-between species that is also omnivorous so it can eat many different things like seeds and berries and things like that that can be dispersed across the landscape. This past summer I finally got the opportunity to set cameras all throughout the Piedmont region of Virginia. I got to meet landowners, work with biologists. It was really interesting talking to landowners and seeing their perspectives on wildlife. All the undergrads in the lab right now are going through the cameras I set and some of the other field sites set just to see what we get, what we find in the Piedmont. It's been fun. The photos, once they've been uploaded into Wildlife Insights, which is an artificial intelligence cloud-based platform, undergrads go in and they basically confirm whether the artificial intelligence was correct in its identification for each picture or if it was incorrect and needs to be adjusted. As much as it's the Gray Fox project, something that is super amazing to me is just the amount of other wildlife we capture on the cameras. I think it's going to just be amazing how much other data we actually get from this type of a project, where you can also potentially use that data in the future to look at other species.