Chimp&See August 2025 Newsletter

Hi Chimp&See-ers

In the last month we had some great accomplishments!

We finished the Prismatic Expanse site in record time! 79 days to classify 49,361 video clips!

We were then able to open a  new site: Eternal Victory! We are now in Sierra Leone in the Ouatmaba Kilimi National Park. We are 15% of the way through the site and we have already found some new-to-us bird species, a big common hippo:

and…a lion! WAYYYYY outside its known range!

Come and join us at Eternal Victory and identify wildlife species from West Africa!

Also, a special request: I (Mimi) will be giving a talk in September at the Max Planck Society Open Science Symposium and really want to show off from where all of our citizens come! If you haven’t done so yet, please add your pin to our padlet map so we know where you are helping us from!

To add your pin, follow these instructions:

1. Log into padlet (without logging in you won't be able to edit your pin later) : https://padlet.com/arandjel/chimp-see-map-remrx1p29h0w49ly

2. On the left side under Community Scientists - click the + sign

3. On the bottom right a window will pop up

4. You can put in your location, or choose “skip for now” (you will have a chance to change this in the next step, so don’t worry!)

5. Then fill in your information as follows 🙂

You can edit anything in your entry by clicking on your pin, then clicking on those 3 dots in the top right corner of your post and selecting “edit”. For example, you can move the pin location to where you feel is best and if it's to a place without an address (like a forest) you will get the pin's new geographic coordinates (in numbers). 

You can also use the map to explore where our field sites have been and see where our international team of collaborators are located!

Thanks so much and see you at ChimpandSee.org!

Cheers,

Mimi & The Chimp&See team!

Chimp&See July 2025 Newsletter

 Dear Chimp&See-ers,

A lot has happened in just 2 short months!

We had an amazing 10-year anniversary where people have since been posting their locations on our map. Add your name and location here if you haven’t done so yet! https://padlet.com/arandjel/chimp-see-map-remrx1p29h0w49ly.

That ended with a treasure hunt. If you missed it, you can still participate here https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/sassydumbledore/chimp-and-see/talk/2279/3651975?comment=5993624&page=1

We also completed our Sunlit Ruins and Black Rock sites!

At Sunlit Ruins we identified 15 new chimps and we are just about wrapping up chimp matching at Black Rock and we will for sure hit 1000 identified chimps by the end of this year!

Also at Sunlit Ruins, we identified our first Black-bellied Pangolin ever at Chimp&See. (Well, it's just a tail, but that was enough to confirm the identity!) Can you spot it in the photo below? https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/sassydumbledore/chimp-and-see/talk/2181/3585743

We also have published two new papers using Chimp&See data in the last months!

Kazaba et al (2025) Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) Indicate Mammalian Abundance Across Broad Spatial Scales https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ece3.71000 used Chimp&See species annotations to show that chimpanzees make great indicators of mammalian abundance in forest. 

Tuyisingizeet et al (2025) Complex Variation in Afrotropical Mammal Communities with Human Impact https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/ece3.71331 used Chimp&See species identifications to show that human impact is really a big driver for species diversity and richness, even when an area is protected.

Both of these papers came out of modelling workshops held in Rwanda and Cote d’Ivoire for African scientists, and we are so pleased that we could contribute our data to the project! 

We are just about to wrap up the Prismatic Expanse site. We have already found Okapi (and have even been matching them thanks to our moderator Libby’s efforts!). And we found melanistic honey badgers that may or may not be the elusive black ratel! 😯

We know it's summer time, but come and help us finish up the last 2000 videos and then…on to the next new site!

With thanks,

Mimi & the Chimp&See team

We celebrate 10 years of Chimp&See!

Dear Chimp&See-ers

10 years! It’s been 10 years since we started Chimp&See on April 22nd, 2015! Time has flown…

…and we have accomplished A LOT!

We have annotated over 330,000 1- minute long videos! Identified more than 990 chimpanzee individuals from 26 field sites across 13 African countries. While also doing 3 mini projects identifying even more chimps at other sites to story research and conversation! We started all sorts of incredible spin off projects like identifying gorillas, elephants, leopards and other unique animals, as well as helping researchers better document camera reactions and disease prevalence at our sites too! We will post more on our accomplishments in an anniversary post on Talk.   

Just in time for our anniversary we have also opened a new site: Prismatic Expanse! It is a very remote site in the north central part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We can’t wait to see what we find there! Read more about it in the Welcome to Prismatic Expanse post!

To celebrate, we invite you all also to join our Chimp&See Map - leave us a pin and show us where you are from. It can be as precise as your street or as imprecise as your country), we’d love to know where you are all from and for you to tell us a bit about yourself!

To add your pin, follow these instructions:

1. Log into padlet (without logging in you won't be able to edit your pin later)
2. On the left side under Community Scientists - click the + signs
3. On the bottom right a window will pop up.
4. You can put in your location, or choose “skip for now” (you will have a chance to change this in the next step, so don’t worry!)
5. Then fill in your information as follows 🙂
6. You can edit anything in your pin by clicking on your pin, then clicking on those 3 dots in the top right corner of your post and selecting “edit”. For example, you can move the pin location to where you feel is best and if it's to a place without an address (like a forest) you will get the pin's new geographic coordinates (in numbers).

You can also use the map to explore where our field sites have been and see where our international team of collaborators are located!

I also want to take this chance to give a HUGE MASSIVE THANK YOU FILLED WITH PANT HOOTS to the current moderator team! Chimp&See would be nothing with them and their hard work: @Boleyn - Heidi, @burdock - Libby, @Eweforia - Carol, @HeikeW - Heike, @Kikilee3 - Karen, @lauraklynn - Laura, @luca-chimp - Lucia, @tgcummings - Tonnie & @yshish – Zuzi 
And last but not least, our incredible tech support and data manager Colleen, the original @SassyDumbledore ❤

I couldn't do it without you, thank you for all these amazing years of support!

And of course the biggest thank you and the most pant hoots to YOU! our Chimp&See community scientists, if you started with us and left or just recently joined us, and anyone in between, thank you for being part of the Chimp&See family and contributing to science and conservation with your time and your joy. Thank you, Merci, Asante Sana, Daalụ, Obrigado, Gracias, Danke, Děkuji, Mauruuru koe, Grazie, Hvala, Xièxiè, Tack, Arigatō…and many many more!

Mimi and the Chimp&See team

PS: If you want to see more of our Anniversary Activities and Celebrations check out our post on Talk!

More Good News about Chimp Matching

Hi Chimp&See-ers,

We have had an exciting few months since our last newsletter in August of 2024.

The August Chimp&See challenge was a huge success - thank you to everyone who participated and accomplished a total of 27,291 classifications in the challenge alone and helped us wrap up the Mathematical Treefort (MT) site!

We also managed to wrap up the MT Chimp matching naming 49 chimps (seen in multiple videos) and identifying an additional 6 unique chimps (only seen once) for a whopping total of 55 chimps at that site!

We also are just about done chimp matching at the Sunlit Ruins site - where we have named 12 chimps, and identified 3 unique chimps for a total of 15 chimps so far!

The PanAf (the umbrella project of Chimp&See) also published a new paper in the journal Science in January on detecting local adaptation in chimpanzee populations across their range. We found that chimps have different adaptations depending on if they live in more forested or more woodland-type habitats. You can read our press release about it here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2025/jan/chimpanzees-are-genetically-adapted-local-habitats-and-infections-such-malaria

In late February, we opened a new small site - we call it Black Rock, but you can find out more about under the name our collaborators use: The Gishwati Research Station in Rwanda (LINK: https://gishwatiresearchstation.org/) - this site is full of chimps but we have very few videos overall so it ran in parallel with the Sunlit Ruins site (which has very few chimps, in fact we think we have identified them all already, but a lot of videos still remain). By the time this newsletter reaches you, the speciesID at Black Rock will be done and the monkeySee may be too, but there are still LOTS of chimps to match from there, so join us!

April 22nd 2025 will be Chimp&See’s 10th Anniversary and we are starting to plan something special for that, so stay tuned and we hope to see you at ChimpandSee.org soon! 🙂

Mimi & the Chimp&See team

Take the Chimp&See Challenge!

It’s August, and we invite you to take the Chimp&See Challenge!

We are 70% through the Mathematical Treefort site, that’s 53,000 video clips processed so far!

As a (hopefully) final push for this site, we invite you to do 5 classifications each day, every day for all of August! 

If you are already a regular annotator, and that goal seems too easy: set your own target! You could go for 10, 20…50 classifications per day! Pick a number and stay consistent! If you miss a day, double up on the next day. 😀

If you want to participate – sign up here: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/sassydumbledore/chimp-and-see/talk/2279/3401975 so we know to track your classifications for the month. 

Complete the challenge and win Chimp&See swag! (as long as supplies last 😏)

See you at chimpandsee.org!

Mimi & the Chimp&See team

Our latest peer-reviewed Chimp&See paper is out!

We are so very happy to announce our latest peer-reviewed Chimp&See paper has been published in Remote Sensing in Ecology and Evolution titled “Highly precise community science annotations of video camera-trapped fauna in challenging environments”

https://zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/rse2.402

Even though they require more time for annotation as compared to stills, camera trap videos provide valuable acoustic and visual information on species behaviour and can improve identification of individuals. 

Using the Community Science (CS) platform Chimp&See (chimpandsee.org), we found that when comparing classification of 13,531 one-minute video clips done by a professional ecologist to those done by 1,744 Chimp&See community scientists, the overall, annotation precision was between 95.4% and 98.1%. Further, citizen scientists provide a wealth of additional information through additional annotations via hashtags in discussion boards. 

Our annotated video data set is already being used for AI algorithm training and our findings demonstrate the competence of community scientists with challenging videos, and hold great promise for future studies on animal behaviour and population monitoring. 

And a MASSIVE thank you and panthoot to our amazing mod @Eweforia (Carol) who made this incredible video abstract of our paper.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQiuAICI-yg

Finally, thank YOU for all your contributions to Chimp&See!!! Since it’s the summer, we have seen a little dip in classifications. We are about 65% through the current site, if you haven’t visited us in a while, please come to ChimpandSee.org today and help us complete the current site! Even 5 or 10 classifications a day help tremendously!

Thank you!

Mimi and the Chimp&See Team

Matching of other animals

It's always super exciting to find a chimp, gorilla, leopard or elephant, but all animals contribute to the health of the rainforest and identifying them helps us understand ecosystems. It’s not often that a duiker or baboon or even a hyrax stands out from the crowd and can be identified as an individual, but sometimes a health issue or an unusual trait makes them unique. We can learn more about these unique animals if they are spotted multiple times. For instance, it is possible to see if they stay in an area, or manage to thrive despite injuries.

So if you spot a health issue (#health_issue) or an injury (#injury) or a distinctive trait (#atypical), please tag it or let moderator Libby know by entering @burdock and get the chance to name a special animal. If you would like to know more about Other Matchable Animals, go to the new Other Matchable Animals Talk Board.

Here are three that volunteers have found and named:

If you would like to know more about C&S’s Health Issue Mini-project, follow this link on the blue banner on C&S screens.

Libby and the Chimp&See team

Happy Earth Day!

Happy Earth Day, dear Chimp&See friends!

Our Florid Postern site is fully complete and we can tell you that we classified a whopping 127,624 video clips and identified 34 chimpanzee individuals, bringing our total number of identified chimps to 923 at Chimp&See since we started 9 years ago on April 22nd, 2015!!!

We’ve also been hard at work at our Mathematical Treefort site with classifications, chimp, elephant and gorilla identification all going on at the same time! It’s been a whirlwind deep in the rainforest of Central Africa.

Did you know that if you find an interesting clip on Chimp&See you can tag it with #dailyzoo – this will put it into our “best of” collection where you can see the highlight videos from every site. Here are some of the highlights from Mathematical Treefort so far: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/sassydumbledore/chimp-and-see/talk/search?query=dailyzoo+mathematicaltreefort

We are about 1/3rd of the way through the current site, so lots more to see, find and annotate – come join us when you can! Even a few annotations a day add up and help our data set!

Panthoots and thank you!

The Chimp&See Team

Why we do Chimp Matching

Dear Chimp&See friends

Thank you so much for all your hard work annotating videos at our new site, MathematicalTreefort! Feel like a change? There is a whole lot more to do at Chimp&See!

For one, there’s the hashtagging of videos you classified with the exact species or behavioural tags, which allows us a more thorough analysis of our data. Want to get started? Check out our hashtagging video tutorial

On top of species identification, another big goal of Chimp&See is to get precise population site estimates for each and every site. For this reason, we do chimp matching to figure out all the unique individuals we have seen (and seen again, and again and again…if we are lucky 😀). At the end of every site we determine the minimum number of males, females, juveniles and infants and from there use mathematical models to estimate the population size. During chimp matching, we also discuss the behaviours we see and any signs of disease, injuries or other hazards. This is all important data for the conservation of chimpanzees. Chimp Matching at MathematicalTreefort, or MT in short, starts on January 29th! 

At MT we’re going even further! Among the animals we see are African Forest Elephants and Western Lowland Gorillas. Both species are classed as 'Critically Endangered' on the IUCN Red List. Therefore, it is of interest to determine the population size and different demographic parameters like sex, age class and group size for these species too. For this, we are going to need to identify individuals, and we like to invite everyone to contribute in the matching and hashtagging process. The following links lead you to the elephant matching board and the gorilla matching board on Chimp&SeeTalk.

So don’t hesitate, participate and try something new to help save endangered animals. Thank you so much for your contribution!

Your Chimp&See team

Welcome to Mathematical Treefort!

Dear Chimp&See friends and family,

We are so happy to say that with all your help we were able to finish the massive Florid Postern site! With almost 130,000 video clips viewed and annotated! Thank you! The trottersID workflow is also completed and monkeysee is about 80% complete. We will keep that open for the weeks to come.

But in the meantime, we have opened a new site – Welcome to Mathematical Treefort – we are back to central Africa and we are deep in chimp AND gorilla territory! The chimps here are known to use tools for termite fishing so look out for tool use. There is also a low density of elephants at this site and it is a known primate hotspot, keep your eyes peeled for drills, mandrills and white-collared mangabeys!

If you want a break from species annotation we are still working on the last of chimp matching from Florid Postern and our Green Snowflake unique chimps mini-project is humming along in the Talk pages. We won’t start chimp matching yet at the new site, but feel free to comment under any interesting videos you find. You can use the #dailyzoo tag for any videos you love, to flag it for others to watch.

Thanks for being with us at Chimp&See and if you haven’t visited in a while, come back and have a peak at the new site!

Cheers, Mimi and the Chimp&See team

Great Progress!

During the past several years we have made great progress at Chimp&See with the help of our volunteers. We have tackled several sites, classified and tagged hundreds of thousands of videos. Our moderators cleaned up a lot of open animal and bird identifications and revised and improved our cheat sheets and field guides. We've added many helpful video tutorials on everything from classifying to chimp matching. Up to date, we identified 2,350 individual chimpanzees, and we were able to name almost one thousand of them, when we've found them twice or more. And we are far from finished!

All of this great work is done by our volunteers, who contribute their time and talents to the project. A big thank you to all of you who are part of our C&S family! Even if you haven’t been with us for a while, come back and join us and see what’s new! 

Our current site is called FloridPostern and to date 108,000 clips have been classified and there are less than 20’000 left to go - will you help us get to the end! Then it's on to the next site!

At FloridPostern, a dry site in the northern range of Western chimpanzees, you will find a lot of interesting and funny baboons. Or make the acquaintance of the hysterical hyraxes, who are masters of camouflage. Other animals may be found as well, like the nocturnal genet or the pretty Patas monkey. Did you know that C&S is also a birder's paradise? You will find a lot of birds in our 15-second videos. We even have a bird guide that contains the about 130 confirmed species we have encountered at C&S so far! Of course, you might also find the occasional chimp.

You see, Chimp&See holds something for every nature lover. Plus the satisfaction of contributing to chimpanzee research and conservation. We are looking forward to seeing you at chimpandsee.org. Thank you and have fun!

Mimi and the Chimp&See team