Tough Environments: Grouse Mountain

Meeting the customer's needs

Grouse Mountain required a CCTV system to monitor four orphaned grizzly bears inside their dens during the hibernation period. The video data,to be used for understanding the behavior and habits of grizzly bears during winter, then needed to be stored for future evaluation.

Factors that had to be taken consideration for the den itself:

1) It is a confined area with no illumination and high humidity.
2) There are minimal opportunities (if any) to gain access inside the den to make adjustments.
3) It was unknown how the bears would react to the cameras.

The cameras needed be tough, unobtrusive, reliable and IR sensitive.

Meeting the Installation requirements

On top of Grouse Mountain, the rugged terrain, harsh alpine environment and long distances between the cameras and monitoring station presented equipment and installation challenges.

Solution

The tough SWX45 camera with day/night functionality was mounted inside each of the two dens to monitor the grizzlies as they hibernate. With the SWX45'built-in IR illuminators, the bears can clearly be seen, even in complete darkness.

At the center of the installation the premium DVMS1600 Duplex digital video management system which records digital video from the cameras at up to 60 fields per second and stores it on hard drives for easy future viewing.

Two S1000 wireless video transmitters were installed to send the video from the bear dens to the monitoring station, without the need for complex cabling.

The Tango II network video server was added to stream up to four cameras overa local network, or the Internet. It allows viewing of real time video so that the grizzlies can be monitored 24 hours a day, 7 days a week over an Internet connection.