Research overview: video, still imagery, and multimodal and thermal sensors

Camera traps can record still images, video, or both, and emerging deployments add thermal imaging and acoustic sensors, each modality offering different strengths for detecting and studying cats. This overview surveys the trade-offs: stills are storage- and battery-efficient and well suited to capturing identifiable flank patterns, while video reveals behavior, movement, and group dynamics and supports methods like the REST model that measure staying time. It discusses thermal cameras that detect animals by body heat independent of visible light, potentially reducing missed detections and false triggers, and multimodal setups combining cameras with audio to capture vocalizations. The overview weighs the costs in data volume, power, and processing against the richer information these modalities provide, and highlights how sensor choice shapes which questions a camera-trap study can answer about felid presence and behavior.