91�ȱ�

Scientists from more than 120 different research institutions have gathered the largest ever photo database of wildlife in the Amazon.

It's all part of a new study by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) which saw around 120,000 images taken in eight different countries using camera traps.

A camera trap is an automatic camera which is triggered when it detects movement in a particular area. This is often used to take images of wild animals.

The images show 289 species taken from 2001-2020 from 143 field sites. The animals captured include big cats like jaguars and pumas, Andean bears, anteaters, harpy eagles, tapirs and toucans.

The study was carried out to build a database of Amazon wildlife images, while also documenting habitat loss and division, as well as climate change.

The Amazon Basin, which is the region the study covered, expands across approximately 3.2 million square miles (8.5 million square kilometres) in Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela.

"WCS scientists were proud to collaborate with such a diverse group of scientists and organizations on this important study," said Robert Wallace who is the director of the WCS's Greater Madidi-Tambopata Landscape Program, and a co-author of the study.

"The tens of thousands of images WCS provided will serve as critical data points to show where wildlife occurs and the staggering diversity of species found in the Amazon region."

147 scientists from 122 research institutions and nature conservation organisations collaborated on the study, which was led by German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) and the Friedrich Schiller University Jena.

It marks the first time camera trap images from different regions of the Amazon have all been put together on a such a large scale.