Mizzou helps Smithsonian map more than 200 years of nature’s progress

June 2, 2026
Contact: Eric Stann, [email protected]
Photo by Mizzou Visual Productions

Armed with trail cameras, artificial intelligence and a powerful national research network, scientists are revisiting Lewis and Clark's legendary journey to see how America's wildlife has changed over the past 200 years.

The University of Missouri is among 55 institutions partnering with the Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute on the Lewis and Clark Trail Resurvey, a nationwide effort in commemoration of America's 250th anniversary. Together, researchers are documenting mammal communities along the historic route and comparing them with records from the original expedition.

Leading Mizzou's efforts is Christine C. Brodsky, an assistant professor of urban ecology in the College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources, along with her team of undergraduate and graduate students.

For scientists, the project's goal goes beyond documenting which species remain. By pairing modern data with Lewis and Clark's observations, they are examining how centuries of land use, development and species loss have reshaped entire ecosystems.

For instance, while Lewis and Clark frequently recorded species that once played dominant ecological roles, such as bison and wolves, those animals are now absent or greatly reduced across much of the trail.

"We're not just asking what species are here," Brodsky said. "We're asking how the whole community functions differently now."

Mizzou's fieldwork is centered at Baskett Forest, a 2,000-acre wildlife research area in Boone County managed by the School of Natural Resources. Once used partly for agriculture, the property - part of the Missouri Agricultural Experiment Station - now serves as a living laboratory for studying how land-use history shapes modern ecosystems.

"This project brings history to life through science," Brodsky said. "By comparing what Lewis and Clark saw to today's landscape, we're revealing how ecosystems have transformed and what that means for the future."

This summer, Brodsky's team is deploying 15 motion-activated trail cameras across Baskett Forest, spaced at least 200 meters apart to capture distinct mammal communities.

The cameras will run continuously, taking tens of thousands of images. Once the photos are uploaded to an online platform, an artificial intelligence program will help sort and identify species before researchers verify the results. The published data will be publicly available to scientists around the world.

This work builds on a long-running Smithsonian-led initiative, Snapshot USA, that collects images of mammals across every state. The growing dataset helps scientists understand how mammals respond to urbanization and land-use shifts across different regions and has expanded to include similar efforts in Europe and South America.

Students play a central role in the research gathering process. Undergraduates help deploy and maintain cameras - sometimes navigating difficult terrain - and serve as the lead researchers for data management and species identification. They also gain experience in data analysis, scientific writing and collaborative research, and some go on to become co-authors on national-scale scientific papers.

"They're not just learning techniques," Brodsky said. "They're contributing to a dataset that's shaping how we think about wildlife management and ecological resilience."

By pairing modern technology with observations written down more than two centuries ago, Mizzou researchers are helping build one of the most ambitious wildlife comparisons ever attempted - one that spans generations, landscapes and scientific disciplines.

MU College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources