Happy 11 year Anniversary - April 2026 Newsletter

 Happy Anniversary dear Chimp&See-ers!

April 22nd 2026 is our 11 year Chimp&See anniversary! 🥳 🐵🎉

I want  to take this opportunity to highlight some of our successes this past year and since the start of the project (on April 22nd 2015 :) !

As of today, 

• We are currently on our 30th of 46 sites

• At each site, a different number of videos was collected, that means that we have classified around 384,000 videos so far of our ~600,000 PanAf videos!

• We have identified a whopping 1125 unique chimpanzees, 923 of these we have seen more than once and have given them names

• We’ve also identified many individuals from other species:

• 30 gorillas

• 45 leopards

• 81 elephants

• and 40 other unique animals from many different species!

Last year, we summarised all the exciting scientific papers that have come from Chimp&See in our 10 year anniversary post but just this past year we have further published the following four papers using Chimp&See data as well!

Our species annotations were used to show that human impact and protected area status shape the diversity and composition of medium-to-large mammal communities in complex, context-dependent ways

• Tuyisingize et al. (2025) Complex variation in afrotropical mammal communities with human impact. Ecology and Evolution 15(5), e71331

Our behaviour and species identifications have been used to train AI algorithms on species and behavioural detection

• Wasmuht et al. (2025) The SA-FARI Dataset: Segment Anything in Footage of Animals for Recognition and Identification. arXiv:2511.15622

• Chan et al. (2025) Towards application-specific evaluation of vision models: Case studies in ecology and biology. arXiv:2505.02825

• Dorne et al. (2025) Zamba: Computer vision for wildlife conservation. Python in Science Conference, 85–111

This last paper allowed us to also start incorporating [AI annotations from Zamba](https://www.zambacloud.com/) into our Chimp&See workflows to reduce the number of views/classifications each clip needs to get. That way, we get through sites faster and have our community scientists focus on hard-for-AI tasks like chimp matching, bird IDs and more! [Read Colleen’s post about it here](https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/sassydumbledore/chimp-and-see/talk/2274/3907743?comment=6387690&page=1}

Another big development this year has been @Eweforia‘s big push to start getting our Chimp&See annotations onto iNaturalist. Carol also wrote a great post about her initiative here and I am happy to say that we have already gotten some great feedback from the conservation community on the usefulness of these observations. :D

Chimp&See observations on iNaturalist

Very Importantly, I want to thank the incredible mod team of @Boleyn, @burdock, @Eweforia, @HeikeW, @Kikilee3, @lauraklynn, @luca-chimp, @tgcummings, @yshish & @Samburu . Without their incredible work running this site, Chimp&See would not be 1/100th of what it is! Thank you for bringing your creativity and wonder to the project and doing such great science with us!

I also want to thank @SassyDumledore for all the hidden magic she does for Chimp&See behind the scenes, thank you Colleen, I could not do it without you!

Finally, I want to thank YOU dear Chimp&See-er for having been part of these last 11 years with us! If you only helped at the start, or just started with us recently, or have been with us any or all of the time, thank you!!!!! Every classification, tag and discussion helps! Feel invited to join us on our Anniversary Post on Talk to continue the good vibes.

As is our new tradition, we are highlighting one special video in our newsletters. This month Karen has chosen this handsome warthog who is part of the camera cleaning crew at Cascading Arches….

Happy Anniversary everyone and thanks for being with us at Chimp&See!

Cheers,

Mimi & The Chimp&See Team 🐵

Chimp&See March 2026 Newsletter

 

Dear Chimp&See-ers

The Chimp&See team has been working hard these last two months and we are officially DONE chimp matching at the Eternal Victory site. A big thank you to Heidi and Tonnie with special support from Heike as mods and the @team for getting through that site. If you want to see the whopping [82 identified chimpanzees from this site check out @Eweforia’s / Carol’s great poster

We are also happy to announce that we have added a new moderator to the team - we are so happy that Jenny / @Samburu has accepted the role and for all her incredible work on the #need_id videos! Welcome Jenny!

The mod team is now made up of: @Boleyn, @burdock, @Eweforia, @HeikeW, @Kikilee3, @lauraklynn, @luca-chimp, @tgcummings, @yshish & @Samburu

Thank you dear mods for all you do, from the flashy jobs up front to the behind the scenes work no one sees, you are the foundation of Chimp&See - thank you!!! 😀

We also now have Sally @sp515507 working hard on leading the bird song identifications! Are you a birder, or do you know one?Join us at the bird board and join our birding group to get into all the avian action at Chimp&See!

Cascading Arches chimp matching is now open! Visit us there if you want to work on your chimpanzee identification skills and have the chance to name a chimp!

We have just under 19,000 CA MonkeySee videos to get through - it's mostly baboons, so the videos are pretty easy to annotate - why not give five a try today! Otherwise see you at Crystal Gully SpeciesID and TrottersID or catch you on Talk. 😄  

Still want more C&S animal excitement? Don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel, or follow us on  Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky and/or Threads to get our best clip of the week featuring an interesting/amazing/oh-too-cute moment at C&S, like this chimp fishing for algae. Doesn’t he look like a pro?

Cheers,

Mimi & The Chimp&See team

Chimp&See February 2026 Newsletter

Dear Chimp&See-ers,

Time passes so quickly when you’re having fun! We hope you all have had a wonderful start to 2026!

Our last newsletter was in October, and since then a lot has happened:

• We finished the Eternal Victory site SpeciesID and TrottersID workflows (MonkeySee still needing classifications)

• We opened and closed the Cascasing Arches site SpeciesID (TrottersID for CA up now!)

• We opened a new site in January called Crystal Gully. This site is located in Gabon in a more savannah-y area, so lots of new things to see and discover - like the first lion seen in Gabon since the 90s! — so come join us at Crystal Gully SpeciesID next time you are online!

You may be wondering how we have been getting through sites so much faster than before, and that is thanks to the assistance of our AI platform Zamba!

Zamba is a machine learning algorithm the PanAf developed with DrivenData to automate species identification from camera trap videos, and it's all based on Chimp&See annotations!

Because even Zamba makes errors, we can’t use it by itself quite yet. But since it gets things right most of the time, we have been combining its answers with our Chimp&See community science annotations for the past few sites to reduce the number of viewers needed to retire a clip. You can read more about how we are doing that in Colleen’s post on Talk.

All this efficiency with SpeciesID has caused a bit of a backlog on MonkeySee, TrottersID, and chimp matching, and that is A-OK. We will take our time with those, BUT if you want to help, please join those side quests!

We also have noticed fewer tags since fewer people are viewing each video, so please feel free to tag as you classify when you are very sure of a species to try to bring the number up to past levels.

Wishing you all the very best for 2026, and see you at Chimp&See.org!

Cheers,

Mimi & the Chimp&See team🐵

 

Chimp&See October 2025 Newsletter

 Hi Chimp&See-ers,

Two exciting months have passed since our last newsletter!

First off, our incredible mod Carol @Eweforia with the support of our data manager Colleen @SassyDumbeldore has spearheaded an effort to start getting out Chimp&See data into iNaturalist! We are so thankful to them both for getting this off the ground! You can see all our observations as far at our iNaturalist Chimp&See page

It has always been our intention to provide all our observations of wildlife to iNaturalist but Carol has taken the reins here and started, focusing first on all of the animals we have observed outside the IUCN species ranges. She will continue working on this for the foreseeable future focusing on updating the vocalization database on iNaturalist and for us to try to provide at least 1 entry /species from each site in the weeks/months to come. Carol wrote a great post about her project here and is ready to answer your questions if you should have any.

We are also happy to report that our Eternal Victory site is almost done and we expect a new site to be up sometime in October! We still have all trotters and monkeys to get through for EV and still some trotters from our previous site Prismatic Expanse, so if you are into antelope, hogs or monkeys join us on those, please!

In the past 2 months we also completed Black Rock chimp matching AND Prismatic Expanse Chimp matching. That brings our total number of identified chimps to 861 named chimps + 182 chimps seen once but that are sure to be unique = 1043 individual chimps identified on Chimp&See! As always a huge thank you to Carol (@Eweforia) for making the posters, our incredible chimp mod team of Heidi (@Boleyn), Tonnie (@tgcummings) and Heike (@HeikeW), our Chimp&See @team of chimp matchers and anyone else who has helped us!

Eternal Victory chimp identification is still going strong - join us there!

Finally, we had some fun outreach in Germany over the past few months. Chimp&See was happy to participate in Leipzig’s Long Night of Science and in the Max Planck Society’s Open Science Ambassadors Annual Meeting

Thanks for being with us and see you at Chimp&See!

Mimi & the Chimp&See team :)

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!