In situ measurements of animal morphological features; a non-invasive method

1) Measurements of morphological features are important for ecological studies, especially on free-ranging wild animal species. Conventionally, specimens either dead or in captivity are used for morphometric studies, which is difficult in the case of wild species for several reasons. Capturing would be even futile when research questions are relating to issues such as prey size selection or estimation of intake rate in under field conditions, where in situ morphometric measurements are inevitable. Remotely estimating morphometric features via, avian bill and head length are always laden with wide variances. Hence, we developed this technique for in situ measurements of animal morphology through digital photographs. 2) This non-invasive novel method for in situ estimation of individuals’ morphometric measurements uses digital photographs' metadata. We extracted the metadata (field of view, focal length, subject-distance etc.,) in Exchangeable Image File Format (EXIF) from digital images ...