Christine Brodsky stood at Baskett Forest in Boone County, Missouri, looking at the landscape where she and her team were about to deploy 15 motion-activated trail cameras—part of an audacious effort to see what 200 years of change has done to American wildlife. The University of Missouri researcher is leading one of 55 institutions partnering with the Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute on the Lewis and Clark Trail Resurvey, a nationwide project that compares wildlife observations from the original 1804–1806 expedition with what exists today.
The stakes of this comparison run deeper than simply noting which animals are still around. When Lewis and Clark traveled across the young nation, they documented species that shaped entire ecosystems—bison and wolves roamed where suburban sprawl now dominates. Today, those keystone species are gone or severely diminished across much of the trail. By pairing the explorers' written records with modern data, Brodsky and her colleagues are mapping something more profound: how centuries of land use, development, and species loss have fundamentally transformed the way entire communities of mammals function.
"We're not just asking what species are here," Brodsky said. "We're asking how the whole community functions differently now."
At Baskett Forest, a 2,000-acre wildlife research area managed by the School of Natural Resources, the work mirrors a larger pattern. Once partly used for agriculture, the property has become a living laboratory where researchers can study how a landscape's human history shapes the animals that thrive there today. This summer, Brodsky's undergraduate and graduate students spaced 15 cameras at least 200 meters apart across the forest, designed to capture tens of thousands of images as they run continuously.
The technology powering the project blends historical documentation with cutting-edge science. Once the cameras upload their photos to an online platform, artificial intelligence software sorts and identifies species before human researchers verify the results. This approach builds on a Smithsonian-led initiative called Snapshot U.S., which has collected mammal images across every state and expanded to Europe and South America, helping scientists understand how wildlife responds to urbanization and land-use change across different regions.
What makes this project distinctive is how thoroughly it distributes both the work and the learning. Undergraduates don't simply assist—they lead data management, species identification, and analysis, sometimes navigating difficult terrain to maintain cameras in the field. These students are gaining hands-on experience in data analysis and scientific writing, and some will become co-authors on papers that shape national-scale wildlife management conversations. They are not merely learning techniques; they are contributing to a dataset that will influence how we think about ecological resilience for years to come.
By pairing the journals Lewis and Clark filled over two centuries ago with modern trail camera data and artificial intelligence, researchers are building one of the most ambitious wildlife comparisons ever attempted. The work spans generations, landscapes, and scientific disciplines—a reminder that understanding where we are requires looking back at where we've been, and that the future of wildlife depends on the lessons hidden in that comparison.