Dr. Roland Kays

Hey, great.

Thanks for having me.

Right now, I'm basically in a van down by the river.

We're on the Missouri River, which is most of the route that we're following.

We're presently at a dam, Fort Peck Dam in Montana.

Well, we are driving and kayaking along the Missouri River.

So we're hitting some of the more significant, more interesting, more beautiful parts of the river in canoes and kayaks, and otherwise we're driving.

And we're obviously looking for wildlife ourselves, but we're also collaborating with a team of scientists, over 100 scientists across the country who are running camera traps.

And these cameras let us document in a systematic way what animals are living all along the route today.

Well, the big question is, is how is wildlife doing today?

And and then comparing that against what Lewis and Clark observed.

So they were meticulously writing down in their journals all the animals that they saw, many of which they were shooting and eating along the route.

We're not shooting and eating animals, but we are getting them on camera and we're able to compare.

You know, how wildlife has changed really over the 250 years, right?

We're up to our country's 250th birthday.

And so this is kind of a long-term reflection of the state of wildlife.

Well, sure.

So we're not the first ones to look at wildlife in North America since Lewis and Clark, right?

There's a long, rich history of that.

So what we're doing is using this as a time point to get a really good systematic survey across this region with the camera traps.