Columbia University

Like many cities, New York is home to wild animals including foxes, raccoons and skunks, along with recent additions such as coyotes and river otters. With expanding green spaces, populations are probably growing, but no overall study has ever been done. A new first-of-its-kind project is censusing these creatures and investigating patterns of movement and dispersal in parks, cemeteries, community gardens and other areas.

Headed by epidemiologist  Maria Diuk-Wasser  and ecologist Sara Kross , part of the project is deploying 40 camera traps along a 50-kilometer transect in Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island’s Nassau County for four 30-day stints. A subset will provide intensive camera surveillance and analyses of overabundant raccoons in Brooklyn’s Greenwood Cemetery. Another team is physically trapping animals along the transect to tag some with GPS monitors to see where they go, and study them for presence of diseases.

Efforts will soon expand into bird counts, and sampling of mosquitoes and ticks. Part of the overall aim is to minimize disease spread and other adverse animal-human interactions.