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