I am managing my very first hunting lease. It's 158 acres; 25 ac hardwoods (black walnut and white oaks), 10-ish acres marsh (more like an underground spring surrounded by blackberries), 7 acres of utility right of way (bush hogged last week) and the remaining acreage is a 4 year old long-leaf pine plantation (great bedding area).

I have several trail cams on the property (Moultrie and Stealth Cams), and 3 feeders to supplement the natural food sources.  

I'd like to start inputting data from my trail cams into an Excel spreadsheet, and use Excel to run some descriptive and predictive statistics.

Basic data I can get from the pictures are things like:

• date, time of day


• temperature


• precipitation- manually input


• number of animals- manually input


• sex, if discernible- manually input


• dwell time (start time of pictures subtracted from time of last picture- automatically calculated


• location (e.g., Cam 1, Cam 2, etc.)


• moon phase

Other data I can get, but will have to pull from external sources are things like barometric pressure and prevailing winds (based on time/date/GPS).

I'm hoping, with enough data, I can create a decent enough sample that I'll be able to do things like estimate herd size, buck to doe ratio, and actually predict the most likely times and locations for the appearance of animals.

I aim to find correlations between variables and examine their relationship to "hits", so that I could, for example, predict that based on the time of day, temperature, xyz, there is a 65% chance of seeing an animal at location 1, 15% chance of seeing an animal at location 5, etc.

I know there are subscription-based websites and apps that can perform the same function, but I'd like to build something myself.

Does anyone have any experience doing this?  Any TTPs you'd care to share?  Ideally, I'd love for someone to share an existing .xls template that I could adapt.

Anyways, I thought this was worth posting.  Please share your thoughts.

add location to the mix (lat/long) and plot on Google Earth

Direction of travel, if possible, would probably be helpful.