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Roland Kays

@rolandkays.com
1.1K followers 153 following 179 posts

Professor at North Carolina State University and scientist at the NC Museum of Natural Sciences. Camera Traps, Animal Tracking, host of the Wild Animals YouTube Channel. Likes to play in the snow.

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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 23/08/2026
Last post from our Lewis & Clark wildlife resurvey. Lewis wrote to Jefferson that these rivers held more beaver than any streams on earth. It was a business plan & it worked. Here's what's left after that enterprise, and whats come back w/ conservation rolandkays.com/reflections-...
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 05/08/2026
New paper - What could the next 20 years of wildlife tracking look like. Our horizon scan, out today in Proc Royal Soc B, maps out 28 innovations to unlock movement ecology's untapped potential. wildlabs.net/en/article/o...
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 23/07/2026
The last paddle of our Lewis & Clark resurvey took us through a forest of fish trap pilings in Baker Bay. The traps were banned in 1934 but the poles testify to the massive scale of this unsustainable fishery rolandkays.com/paddling-bak...
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 13/07/2026
Wildlife Insights is hiring an Executive Director. Lead the global camera trap data platform, its AI, its science agenda, and its partnership with WCS smithsonian WWF NaturalSciences WildMon & Google www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/44...
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 10/07/2026
Postdoc opportunity with Alex Jensen at Texas State University is hiring a postdoc in wildlife/macroecology. Range dynamics, citizen science & computer vision using iNaturalist data. $60K/yr + benefits, 2 yrs funding. Start early 2027. Apply by 9/30/26: alexjojensen.weebly.com
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 04/07/2026
Retracing Lewis & Clark down the Columbia. They portaged the Cascades in 1805. Bonneville Dam drowned those rapids so we easily paddled through. Watched salmon climb the fish ladder past the counting windows. But 8 dams to the ocean, and it adds up.https://rolandkays.com/paddling-from-bonneville/
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 25/06/2026
Beavers build better fish habitat than we do! This awesome dam complex on Idaho state land creates the deep pools and floodplain storage that steelhead need, plus acts as fire resilient sponge 🦫🐟🌲🔥https://rolandkays.com/state-lands-the-beaver-built-salmon-streams/
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 22/06/2026
At Canoe Camp on the Clearwater, Lewis & Clark built dugouts and ran the first serious rapids of their trip. We paddled the same water 221 years later and sat down with Nez Perce experts to learn what's happened to the salmon since. rolandkays.com/padding-the-...
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 11/06/2026
Grizzly, wolf, mountain lion, elk — almost the full cast Lewis & Clark saw here is still on the Rocky Mountain front. We spent a day checking trail cameras on the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Ranch with Boone and Crockett Club. The cameras don't lie. rolandkays.com/roosevelt-ranch-predators/
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 10/06/2026
Stop 2 of our Lewis and Clark Resurvey was to launch or canoes down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh, just like Merriweather Lewis did. rolandkays.com/pittsburgh-p...
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 01/06/2026
Observing a free-ranging bison herd on American Prairie lands was the wildlife moment of the trip. The northern Montana grasslands are closer to what Lewis & Clark described than almost anywhere else. Our resurvey cameras are now running here too. rolandkays.com/prairie-conservation/
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 31/05/2026
Students from Aaniiih Nakoda College helped us deploy camera traps on the Fort Belknap Reservation as part of the Smithsonian's Lewis & Clark Mammal Resurvey. Bison, swift fox, black-footed ferrets — this prairie has it all. rolandkays.com/prairie-conservation/
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 30/05/2026
Students from Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College just deployed 40 camera traps across the Fort Berthold Reservation as part of the Smithsonian's Lewis & Clark Mammal Resurvey + tribal wildlife program. Can't wait to see what turns up! rolandkays.com/nueta-hidatsa-sahnish-college-camera-traps/
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 29/05/2026
Prairie dogs have the worst PR team! They run matriarchal colonies, communicate w sophisticated alarm system, and engineer habitat that bison, ferrets, owls, and badgers all depend on. Meanwhile Capybara just vibing & have more followers rolandkays.com/sdsu-prairie-dogs/ @AECheeseman
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 28/05/2026
Meriwether Lewis: "the river is wide, full of large sandbars, the water very rapid and of a yellowish brown colour. Its banks are falling in." Standing on the same Missouri River sandbars today, it fits! One of the only places on the route where that's true rolandkays.com/goat-island-ponca
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 27/05/2026
Lewis & Clark heard their first coyote near here in 1804 a "prairie wolf barking at us as we passed." Now Teresa Graham from Little Priest Tribal College is running camera traps at the same spot, and coyotes are still showing up. 🐺📷 rolandkays.com/adams-homestead
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 27/05/2026
Stop 4: Seeing William Clark's original field journal at the Missouri History Museum. Elkskin binding worn smooth by two years on the trail. Every species we're documenting today started as an entry on these pages. rolandkays.com/forest-park/
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 25/05/2026
Stop 5 of the Lewis and Clark Reurvey: pushing upstream out of St. Louis against the same river currents Lewis and Clark fought for 2,000 miles. Even a few miles is humbling. Reward: 11 bald eagles and a duckling that jumped in our boat to escape one. rolandkays.com/paddling-ups...
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 24/05/2026
Stop 3 of the Lewis & Clark Mammal Resurvey: Tom's Run, WV. Fisher are back. The forest is back. But without wolves or mountain lions, deer have hit ~40 per sq mi, twice a healthy target. Tree saplings need a plastic tube to survive. rolandkays.com/university-o...
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 22/05/2026
Stop 2 of our Lewis and Clark Resurvey was to launch or canoes down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh, just like Merriweather Lewis did. rolandkays.com/pittsburgh-p...
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 22/05/2026
Stop 1 of the Lewis & Clark Mammal Resurvey: a fisher walked into our western PA cameras on its own, a species trapped to extinction here that's quietly returning. Plus beavers, breeding sandhill cranes, and three canid species. rolandkays.com/barkasky-farm/
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 06/05/2026
The Path Forward: Managing this "post-peak humanity" world requires: • ✅ Non-lethal conflict mitigation (fencing, deterrents). • ✅ Incentivizing regulated hunting. • ✅ Proactive monitoring of recovering populations.
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 06/05/2026
/ As people move to cities and rural populations decline, abandoned farmland is returning to forest. This "land abandonment" provides the perfect habitat for large herbivores and their predators to reclaim old territory. 📊 The Data
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 06/05/2026
🧵 A surprising wildlife trend is emerging that could be a sign of the future: large mammals are making a massive comeback in parts of Europe and Japan. The driver? Human depopulation in rural areas. New paper: 🔗 besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 29/04/2026
🐺🐻‍❄️🦌🫎🦃🦅🐒🦝🦫🦬🐘🦉🐿️🦨🦡🐾🦎📷🧬 Hiring: Biodiversity Lab Manager @NaturalSciences Anticipated opening this summer Help run our on-exhibit Lab in Raleigh MS required Sign up for an alert when it goes live #cameratraps #AI #computervision docs.google.com/forms/d/1nrS...
A picture of the north carolina museum of natural sciences
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 17/04/2026
Coyote Crossing premiers April 20 at 7 PM on @pbs.org covering the story of Canis latrans from tar pits to neighborhoods, and including a short appearance by me and my cat robot
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 10/04/2026
Meet the champ. Broad diet, broad habitat tolerance, fast reproduction — Peromyscus are the ultimate generalists. They're also the primary reservoir for Lyme disease and hantavirus. When one genus dominates community structure, that has consequences beyond just the ecology.
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 10/04/2026
This plays out across the continent. East of the Rockies especially, one genus is structuring entire small mammal communities. The dominance fades west, but it's still there in most regions Peromyscus occurs.
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 10/04/2026
That something else: raw abundance. Peromyscus (mainly P. leucopus, P. maniculatus, and P. gossypinus) were the sole dominant entity at 53% of sites — accounting for 58% of total interaction strength on average. Coexistence theory predicted them as dominant at 0% of sites.
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 10/04/2026
Classic coexistence theory says overlap of species traits — diet, habitat breadth, body size, life history — should predict who competes hardest with whom. We tested that. It didn't hold up well. Something else was driving community structure.
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 10/04/2026
We used NEON data: 68 species, 44 sites across the US, 7 years of abundance estimates. This isn't one forest in New England. This is everywhere.
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 10/04/2026
If you've ever run a live trap in the eastern US, you know the feeling: open the box, and it's another deer mouse. New paper out: Peromyscus isn't just common at your site — they're dominating small mammal communities continent-wide. 🧵
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 06/02/2026
Post Doc Job open with us to work with biologists to build AI models to analyze camera trap data. The specific focus will be to study animal coloration and camouflage, but there will be opportunities to work on other related projects. jobs.rwfm.tamu.edu/view-job/?id...
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 15/11/2025
Yes Indiana does have some big trees and spotted cats :)
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 15/11/2025
what NC Mammal species?
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 03/11/2025
👍AI to help identify the species in a cameratrap 👎AI to change the pose and posture of your animal www.eco-business.com/news/ai-edit...
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 21/10/2025
1 week left to apply to our Postdoc job with our lab using AI to analyze camera trap images at the NC Museum of Natural sciences and NCSU and in collaboration with Wildlife Insights https:/​/​jobs.ncsu.edu/​postings/​223025
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 18/09/2025
Quick - apply for this job as manager of our #Biodiversity lab at the NC Museum of Natural Sciences and NCSU to work with #tech and #biodiversity including camera traps, #AI and student mentoring Deadline is 9/23/2025 www.governmentjobs.com/careers/%7B0...
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 12/08/2025
Dances like wolves? Evaluating ecological replacement of apex predators in eastern North America stacksjournal.org/article/jens...
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 18/06/2025
see also this nice summary news.ncsu.edu/2025/06/huma...
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 18/06/2025
Check out our new paper in Current Biology on how well Chinese protected areas have preserved mammal and bird communities #cameratrap includes work-of-art figures by lead author Junjie Liu www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 06/06/2025
you can also use clock time or sun time - look at the difference in this activity graph for raccoons. The data comes year-round from NC so sunrise/sunset vary quite a bit, messing up their peak of activity after sunset. Surprising it has little affect on their before-bed peak.
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 06/06/2025
Coyote and grey fox daily activity. Foxes avoid our yard in the evening but not the early AM. cool
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 06/06/2025
Here's the monthly detection rates for coyotes, red and grey foxes from my yard over the last few years. Grey foxes are the most common, red foxes rare visitors, maybe when the coyotes are away.
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 06/06/2025
The analytics are now live for all users on Wildlife Insights for camera trap data. Here's the average detection rate for mammals in my back yard over the last few years. www.wildlifeinsights.org
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 05/06/2025
Anticipated Job Opening - Biodiversity Lab Manager at the NC Museum of Natural Sciences. Come join our group using technology to monitor biodiversity #AI #Cameratrap #Animaltracking #GPS docs.google.com/document/d/1...
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 12/04/2025
Nice paper showing cats are rare where coyotes roam in NYC link.springer.com/article/10.1...
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 21/03/2025
Find the 🐸
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 14/03/2025
Check out Snapshot Japan - open camera trap data from the first national mammal survey (2023), keep an eye out for even more data from 2024 coming next year. bdj.pensoft.net/article/1411...
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Roland Kays @rolandkays.com · 13/03/2025
Such an amazing bat!
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