Welcome to the Chimp&See Blog!

Happy Earth Day! Be a Citizen Scientist and help us learn about chimps and humans!

Chimp&See is a web-based platform where enthusiastic amateur researchers can watch and document the contents of the Pan African Programme: The Cultured Chimpanzee (PanAf) remote camera trap videos. We have collected nearly 7,000 hours of footage, reflecting various chimpanzee habitats, from camera traps in 15 countries across Africa. 

By scanning the videos from these traps and identifying the types of species and activity that you see, you’ll help us to understand the lives of these apes – their behaviors, relationships, and environments – and to extrapolate new ideas about human origins.

The PanAf is based out of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany and aims to quantify a broad spectrum of the ecological parameters that possibly contribute to generating behavioural diversity in chimpanzees. For this we have been collecting systematic ecological, social, demographic and behavioral data from 40 chimpanzee temporary research sites (TRS). These are spread out over the whole natural range of chimpanzees, including all extremes of their habitats, and placed systematically across their area of occurrence, to be able to tease apart the genetic, ecological and social drivers of diversity generating processes. Most of the TRS focus on populations which have never been studied in detail, however, some are also located at well-established long-term research sites.

Citizen Science innovators at Zooniverse developed the Chimp&See platform in collaboration with the PanAf and the project was joint funded by Zooniverse, the Heinz L. Krekeler Foundation and the Max Planck Society Innovation Fund.

For our full press release please visit the Max Planck Society website.

Please visit Chimp&See to help us find out more about chimpanzees across Africa!