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. 😀
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.
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!
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
Visit us at ChimpandSee.org today and contribute to research and conservation !
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.
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.
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!
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!
PanAf founder and co-director Christophe Boesch passed away suddenly on Sunday January 14th 2024
The PanAf was Christophe's legacy project, his great vision and he greatly supported our work on Chimp&See. He was a very great man and the world is a lot worse now that he is gone.
We even caught him on our PanAf/Chimp&See camera traps a few times at various sites:
Today at the MPI-EVA,I gave one of the speeches at his memorial tribute which mainly focused on his academic work. My friend and colleague Dr. Tobias Deschner, then focused on all the achievements of the Wild Chimpanzee Foundation.
My text is posted below, but I would like to encourage you to follow the WCF on youtube, linkedin, facebook, instagram and on their website. It is my favourite NGO and they do amazing grass roots, evidence-based conservation work, and supporting them is the best way to honour Christophe's memory.
-- (extracted from the MPI-EVA Tribute to Christoph Boesch. January 25th 2024. M. Arandjelovic)
I came to this institute with a passion for wildlife conservation, genetics and an obsession with gorillas. But over the last 20 years Christophe Boesch managed to convince me that chimps were pretty cool too.
Christophe was a pioneer. I can list a ton of firsts. With his wife Hedwige, they established the Tai Chimpanzee Project in 1979 and were the first to habituate chimpanzees without provisioning. This meant they just followed shadows in the forest, hoping for years that one day the chimps would just stop running away. Legend has it that this was because the chimps wouldn’t eat the bananas Christophe tried to give them. But be it intentional or reactive, Christophe and Hedwige kept at it for 5 years, trusting a process no one had tried before, a mix of confidence and hope, that it would work, with enough persistence.
Christophe’s Tai Chimpanzee Project revealed western chimps to be more gregarious than those that had been documented in the east and taught us about chimpanzee adoption by males, of unrelated orphan infants. He was the first to document cooperative hunting in chimpanzees. He is one of the founding fathers of animal culture and it's basis in social learning. He debated tirelessly across fields, advocating for species-specific, culturally-relevant and ecologically-appropriate testing in both human and primate cognition studies. Christophe is also the founding father of primate archaeology, bringing archaeologists to Tai to excavate a 4000 year old chimpanzee stone tool use site in 2001.
In 2005 Christophe started the Loango Ape Project in Central Africa, and as was the trend at several of the newer chimp research sites, the more we looked, the more chimpanzee behavioural diversity was found.
This inspired Christophe’s legacy project the Pan African Programme: The Cultured Chimpanzee which he started with Hjalmar Kuehl in 2010. The ambitious idea of creating short-term research sites, for as many chimpanzee groups as possible across their range, to better understand the behavioural repertoire of chimps and the evolutionary drivers of that diversity. Over 10 years, non-invasive data was collected from 18 countries and over 50 chimpanzee sites, and has already led to exciting revelations on the evolution of behavioural diversity. At the time, the PanAf project was thought of as unfeasible and over reaching, but thanks to Christophe’s vision and leadership, its already being replicated in other taxa.
Christophe often said he felt indebted to the chimps. and that the only way he felt he could repay that debt, was to ensure their protection.
He not only established the Wild Chimpanzee Foundation in 2000, but he also made sure his NGO would follow evidence-based ground-truthed practices. He supervised countless students whose research focus was improving conservation and biodiversity assessments, so that the basis of WCF recommendations and interventions would be to the highest scientific standards. This led to the birth of the A.P.E.S. database and eventually the A.P.E.S. wiki where all ape survey data is centralized and widely accessible.
I don’t want to just list his accomplishments though, I want you to know this man supported me and cheerleaded me, as he did for many others, and many other women in particular. He also understood the importance of nurturing chimpanzee range country scientists and did so enthusiastically. He supported them academically, but also encouraged them to take leadership roles in their home countries. So many students and researchers came through these MPI hallways from Cote d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Cameroon, Liberia, Rwanda, Gabon and more. This includes Christophe’s PhD student Dr. Simone Ban, the first woman to obtain her doctorate from the largest university in cote d'Ivoire in 2017.
Christophe valued a lot of things about people that don’t usually get valued in academia. He valued different view points, he liked to be challenged and to talk through difficult topics and he made us do the same, he brought us to the table. He didn’t mind if people felt passionately, feelings and topics were not scary or taboo, discussion was the way towards resolution.
When I joined the Max Planck, many moons ago, I had no field experience, I was a lab person and at that time, the two did not mix. But Christophe let me go to Tai anyway so that I could see the forest and the chimps. Specifically because he thought it would make me a better scientist. And it was indeed life changing. When he joined me in the forest a month after I had been there he was able to show me so much more than I had been seeing. I saw the forest through his eyes, i hadn’t been seeing the things I was looking at. His knowledge and passion were absolutely magical, and I am so very sad that I won’t get to be with that again.
During that trip, in a time before GPSs, he kept trying to teach me how to use my map and compass and find the trails at Tai. No matter how many times I screwed it up though, he was so encouraging when I succeeded. As if I had done it on the first try. I was also not the most agile primate ever to enter the Tai forest either, and there were a lot of snickers from the field assistants every time I tripped and fell to my face AGAIN on the forest floor . And I remember at some point in the afternoon, Christophe casually said to one of the assistants, but loud enough so that I could hear, “even though she falls a lot, she gets up really well”. And At the time, I mainly thought this was a kindness. a way to motivate me forward, to make sure I was still going to collect my data.
But now when I think about it, I think it was actually an overarching metaphor for how Christophe approached things and inspired people. Do your best, you may fail, try again, try again, don’t get discouraged, keep fighting, don't let the snickers of others keep you down, keep trying to figure it out. You will get there.
Christophe should still be here. He should be still fighting for the chimps. We need him, the chimps need him, the forests need him and I am absolutely ruined that he is gone. I only take solace in knowing how many people he inspired and that will carry on his amazing legacy.
Rest in Power Dear Christophe and thank you SO much for everything. Merci.
This video was made by/for the 2023 Indianapolis Prize for with Christophe was a finalist and showcases what an incredible force of nature he was.
