In 1804, when Thomas Jefferson dispatched Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and their Corps of Discovery to explore the newly acquired land west of the Mississippi, the president’s primary aim was political: Americans needed to establish presence, power and trade routes in these territories before the Europeans beat them to it.
But Jefferson, an ardent naturalist, had a secondary agenda. He ordered that the expedition also survey the flora and fauna of these landscapes. On their two-year jaunt across the western half of the country, Lewis and Clark kept meticulous journals of the animals and plants they encountered: bison, horned lizards, sage grouse, prairie dogs, wild licorice and catfish, among them. These observations were pivotal in shaping an early understanding of North American biodiversity.
These “discoveries” were hardly new to the Indigenous tribes who had occupied the Great Plains and west for millennia, however. While European Americans tend to see the Lewis and Clark expedition as a triumphant achievement, many Native Americans remember it as an invasion, the bugle blast of forced removal and relocation.
“There are a lot of negative feelings about that history,” says Dan Buresh, a recently retired environmental science professor at Sitting Bull College on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation just outside Fort Yates, North Dakota. Nevertheless, when Buresh learned that ecologists with the Smithsonian National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute would be conducting another wildlife survey along Lewis and Clark’s historic route – this time using thousands of motion-triggered trail cameras installed by partner institutions across the country – he wanted his students to be a part of it.
Staff at the Smithsonian were on the same page. Unlike the first survey, when the many Native contributions to the Lewis and Clark expedition – which relied on tribal partners for navigation, diplomacy and protection – were downplayed or unacknowledged, the Smithsonian wanted to prioritize Native participation this time around. “Early on, we reached out to every tribal college along the trail,” says Brigit Rooney, the re-survey’s project coordinator. “Tribes were critical to the success of the Lewis and Clark expedition and we wanted to recognize those contributions by including current tribal members in the re-survey.” The Smithsonian’s Women’s Committee also raised money to enroll tribal students as paid interns, the only re-survey volunteers to receive a stipend.
In the end, seven tribal colleges signed up to run cameras, manage data and interpret the changes that have occurred over the last two centuries on their reservations, where this type of ecological knowledge is transmitted orally but rarely published.
“There are a lot of elders that are passing this information on from their childhood memories,” Buresh says. “This project allows us to ground-truth some of that, and to get the real-time data.”
At first, some residents of Standing Rock, which spans both Dakotas and is home to the Lakota and Dakota Nations, were hesitant about opening up their lands to outsiders. Buresh heard concerns from elders that the data would be used to, for instance, locate prime hunting spots. Others said they had felt burned in the past by scientists who had come to collect data and then not included tribal members on resulting studies.
“Sometimes, in the past, when we’ve shared this information, we didn’t really have full control over it afterwards,” says Tamiera Garter, a junior in environmental science and project intern who helped deploy the cameras. But Garter and fellow intern Precious Yellow Fat came to believe that gathering contemporary data was integral for their community, offering an opportunity to confirm or update the traditional ecological knowledge held by their elders. Some residents, for example, worry about the impact of climate change on the reservation’s wildlife, a concern that’s difficult to validate or address without data.
“We cannot protect what we cannot see or don’t understand,” says Yellow Fat, who recently graduated with a bachelor’s degree in environmental science. “Having those cameras out there will help us get insight on how we can manage the land and the species that live on it.”
“At the end of the day, it will protect our sovereignty,” Garter adds. “It will allow us to have more autonomy with decisions we make around management and conservation.”
The re-survey, which received funding from the Smithsonian’s Our Shared Future initiative, a commemoration of the country’s semiquincentennial,kicked off in early 2025 when Smithsonian staff digitized Lewis and Clark’s journals, geolocating hundreds of wildlife observations the survey party made along the way. In spring 2026, more than 50 research partners in 15 states activated camera arrays across the original route. Buresh, Yellow Fat, Garter and fellow students installed 16 across the 2.3m-acre (931,000-hectare) Standing Rock, which required several field days and a lot of hiking.
Before the photos even started rolling in, the experience was revelatory, say Yellow Fat and Garter, both members of the Lakota tribe.
“We saw a side of nature we don’t usually see,” says Garter. “I never saw the hills and grasses be so animated.” In addition to admiring chest-high grass and running from fearsome hailstorms, the students learned to identify birds and harvested quills from a dead porcupine to use in regalia and earrings. They got to spend time in sacred and historic sites they had learned about from their parents and teachers.
When the cameras began capturing images, Yellow Fat and Garter found stark ecological differences between the two watersheds – the Grand River in South Dakota and Cannonball River in North Dakota – on the reservation where they had spent much of their lives. They’ve seen close-up snaps of typically elusive bobcat and mule deer. They’ve puzzled over why certain animals show up at certain times, whether they’re looking for mates, food or cover. “We aren’t really just taking pictures,” Garter realized. “We’re trying to understand these animals.”
Bill McShea, the Smithsonian wildlife ecologist who conceived of the re-survey project, hopes the initiative will allow its tribal partners to get some overdue credit for taking good care of the wildlife in their charge. Indigenous tribes manage more land than the National Park Service, and previous studies have shown higher biodiversity on acres overseen by Indigenous stewards compared with other entities.
“If we look at where the bison are right now, where the good carnivore populations are right now, they’re on Indian reservations,” McShea says. “It’s because they have a better ethos toward wildlife than we do,” he adds, pointing to the spiritual role that animals play in many tribal cultures.
The re-survey is an extension of Snapshot USA, a nationwide wildlife-monitoring project McShea helped to launch in 2019 that partners with institutions around the country to track long-term trends in mammal population using camera traps. The ecologist modeled the program, in part, after the popular app eBird, which has gathered more than 200bn observations of birds since 2002 with the help of more than 100 million users.
“I was so jealous of the bird people. Bird people know everything about birds because they have 10,000 binoculars going out there every year and writing down what they see,” McShea says. “We had almost none of that information about mammals.”
To date, Snapshot USA has logged more than 1m records of mammals across all 50 states. These images are identified by AI and validated by volunteer scientists. The project has been largely successful in filling in gaps about mammal distribution, diversity and behavior, McShea says, except in sparsely populated parts of the country. “There just aren’t a lot of people in the Great Plains, so we have holes in our data there.”
When the semiquincentennial came along (as well as funding to celebrate the US’s natural history), McShea saw a poetic way to address those holes. The re-survey could commemorate Lewis and Clark’s original contribution to science, while also gathering data in parts of the country that Snapshot USA wasn’t capturing.
So far, re-survey partners have captured more than 5.5m images of a confirmed 67 species. There have even been some heartening findings among them, according to Rooney, the project coordinator: a slew of photos of American beavers, for example, a species that was being slaughtered for their fur by the millions in the early 19th century, resulting in their near extinction. Fishers – another small mammal in the weasel family – have shown up in Pennsylvania, where they were once completely wiped out by trappers. “The story we have in our heads about conservation is usually negative,” says Rooney, “but there are many positive stories to find.”
The trail cams took their last snaps at the end of October, and volunteers across the nation are now identifying the species that appear in each one uploaded to a dedicated project page. McShea says that once the project is complete, the data will be free and available to anyone who wants it, including land managers in charge of hunting regulations or scientists endeavoring to support endangered species.
Yellow Fat and Garter may be two of those scientists. Both are planning careers in natural resource management. Being part of this project, they say, has allowed them to hone their science chops while providing their tribes some of the recognition they deserve.
“I have no disdain for Lewis and Clark. I simply see them as researchers,” says Garter. “But we were some of the first stewards of the land, who understood how everything connected. So, for this opportunity to come back to us today, despite all we have been through as a people, it feels full-circle.”
