Sunday, June 28, 2015

Green Mamba Snake!

For today's #DailyZoo: We did not expect to get many (any!) snakes on our camera traps so we did not even include them in the field guide. However our citizen scientists found an amazing series of videos of a green mamba and hashtagged them with #snake so we have even more data than we had hoped for! abssssolutely amazing!

watch the videos here:
http://talk.chimpandsee.org/#/subjects/ACP00040gu
http://talk.chimpandsee.org/#/subjects/ACP00040gv
http://talk.chimpandsee.org/#/subjects/ACP00040gw

Thursday, June 11, 2015

Willkommen!

Chimp&See is now featured on the German citizen science portal Burger Schafen Wissen

We hope to welcome more of the German public to the fold!



Wednesday, June 10, 2015

Snapshot Serengeti's massive success!

Snapshot Serengeti, the Zooniverse project that inspired Chimp&See, is a HUGE success and the first paper is now out! Congratulations to everyone who participated! 

The Washington Post did a great write up on the success of the project: "A new database of wildlife photos from the Serengeti is an Internet rabbit hole of baby animals"

and if you want to read the original paper, it can be found here: http://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201526

Swanson A, Kosmala M, Lintott C, Simpson R, Smith A, Packer C (2015) Snapshot Serengeti, high-frequency annotated camera trap images of 40 mammalian species in an African savanna. Scientific Data 2, Article number: 150026 (2015) ​doi:10.1038/sdata.2015.26
 
Abstract: Camera traps can be used to address large-scale questions in community ecology by providing systematic data on an array of wide-ranging species. We deployed 225 camera traps across 1,125 km2 in Serengeti National Park, Tanzania, to evaluate spatial and temporal inter-species dynamics. The cameras have operated continuously since 2010 and had accumulated 99,241 camera-trap days and produced 1.2 million sets of pictures by 2013. Members of the general public classified the images via the citizen-science website www.snapshotserengeti.org. Multiple users viewed each image and recorded the species, number of individuals, associated behaviours, and presence of young. Over 28,000 registered users contributed 10.8 million classifications. We applied a simple algorithm to aggregate these individual classifications into a final ‘consensus’ dataset, yielding a final classification for each image and a measure of agreement among individual answers. The consensus classifications and raw imagery provide an unparalleled opportunity to investigate multi-species dynamics in an intact ecosystem and a valuable resource for machine-learning and computer-vision research.

Want to be take part in more citizen science? Please visit Chimp&See!

Friday, June 5, 2015

Elephants: family, a greeting and camera no likey

Three videos from West Africa of forest elephants for today's #DailyZoo!

1) A really nice family shot: 

VIDEOS HERE:

2) Some elephant greeting, trunks intertwined:

VIDEOS HERE:

3) ...and a little camera distrust:


VIDEOS HERE:
http://talk.chimpandsee.org/#/subjects/ACP0002300
http://talk.chimpandsee.org/#/subjects/ACP0002301
http://talk.chimpandsee.org/#/subjects/ACP0002302

***fun fact - elephants are really good at smelling human scent on the cameras and that is what we think bothers them so much about them. Therefore at our sites with elephants we often cover the camera boxes with elephant dung to hide the human smell so the elephants don't react to them.**