The Best of the best in 2020

2020 has been a difficult year for many and it seems to us that Chimp&See – as other online citizen science projects as well – could provide a little bit of relief and entertainment amongst the turmoil in the world. We had a huge spike in classifications and new volunteers. We are grateful for all the help and support for our project. We love your interest in annotating our wildlife videos from all over Africa, especially the chimpanzees, and your questions while doing so. During the year, we worked on four sites that are in various stages of near-completion and a mini-project. 

The science team also published the first Chimp&See paper in Ecology and Evolution that investigated how reliably volunteers at Chimp&See can identify individual chimpanzees from cameratrap footage only. For this, they compared the matching results of Chimp&See volunteers with chimp identifications by scientists from the same videos. The scientists knew those (habituated) chimpanzees from fieldwork. The results are promising: despite identifying fewer chimpanzees in the videos (only about 50% of the chimpanzees present ended up to be successfully matched to another chimp), the Chimp&See volunteers could reliably identify the members of this “test community”. That means, they identified (nearly) the same number of chimpanzees, but identified each chimp less often. The team created a great video abstract that you can watch here.

Before Christmas, we asked you about your “Best of 2020” – your biggest surprise, creepiest and funniest clips, the best camera reaction, and of course your favorite chimpanzee. We compiled all nominations, made poll, and here are the results from your votes: 

 

Favorite chimp 2020: Freddy - or at Chimp&See called Loango-Freddy

 

 

The funniest video 2020: giant kingfisher vs. bird

 

 

The creepiest video 2020: his gait looks painful, but elephant Hawking is our hero!

 

 

The biggest surprise 2020: no comment needed ;-)

 

 

The best camera reaction: researchers having fun

 

 

If you missed the voting stage, but want to see all nominations – please check out the playlist on our youtube channel (and subscribe for more - we post every Wednesday!)

What will happen in 2021? Well, we have many more research sites coming, needing furthermore your help to annotate the videos to the species level in three workflows: ‘Species ID’, ‘MonkeySee’, and ‘Trotters ID’. Currently, the Central African site Green Toadstool is in the classification phase and chimp matching is starting at Soaring Leaf – a West African site – on January 25th. Check out the intro post, read the instructions, and become part of the team!  

We will also move forward with the leopard and elephant mini-projects in 2021 and start gorilla identification, too.

Thanks to all who voted, nominated, classified, and tagged videos at Chimp&See! We hope to see you around furthermore this year. Please come over and discover the secret life of chimpanzees (and gorillas, and leopards, and all the other critters).