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 :)

Inclusive chimpanzee conservation

"Thanks to a pair of great primatologists we had the chance to highlight chimpanzee conservation in a recent letter published today in Science. Check out the important discussion about culture, conservation and of course chimps!" - Ammie Kalan

Read the letter and the PanAf response here: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/364/6445/1040.2.full.pdf

Fantastic Beasts and How to ClassiFind Them: Pri-matrix Factorization Competition

We've partnered with Driven Data and the ARCUS foundation to offer a new €20,000 challenge that takes data scientists deep into the jungles of Africa. Camera traps are useful for non-invasive observation of wildlife and have the potential to free up huge amounts of research time -- but they can't yet automatically flag and label the species they observe.

In this project, a global community has annotated videos through the Chimp&See Zooniverse project, and now its time for the data scientist community to turn those labels into algorithms! You'll find here one of the largest labeled camera trap datasets for you to practice your skills and help researchers delve into the secrets of life on Earth!

Utilizing both crowdsourced labels as well as crowdsourced algorithms, this ambitious computer vision competition is in a league of its own. The winning techniques developed here will provide a starting point for production-level automated species tagging for use in camera trap systems around the world. By decreasing the time that experts spend watching empty footage, we can improve their ability to focus on the outcomes that matter most.

On Chimp&See people from around the world have been recording what they see in each video but they also carry out more complex tasks such as identifying unique chimpanzee individuals and tagging primates and other animals to the species level. With this competition we hope to use machine learning to accomplish the first task more time efficiently thereby allowing citizen scientists to focus on the more complex tasks of the project!

For more info check out the DrivenData blog and the competition!

Chimp&See at the March for Science Leipzig

The MPI-EVA was well represented at the March for Science in Leipzig today and we even did some Chimp&See outreach that made it to the local paper! We were 1300 strong at our march and were humbled to be part of the worldwide peaceful protest :D

If you marched today we hope you had a great and safe march! #ScienceIsForEveryone

***Updated!*** Chimp&See Science Team "Ask Us Anything" April 25th

To commemorate the 2nd anniversary of ChimpandSee.org, the Chimp&See science team will host a special “Ask Us Anything” (AUA) event that will be held on Tuesday, April 25th, 2017 at https://talk.chimpandsee.org/#/boards/BCP000000u/discussions/DCP0001qor

Members of the science team will be online between 4 and 6 p.m. UTC to answer all the questions you might have about the project, its research questions, field work, preliminary results, lessons learned, and future directions. We're also happy to discuss our research, conservation and field experience so go ahead and Ask Us Anything :) To learn more about the science team beforehand, check out our Introductions, the PanAfrican Programme: The Cultured Chimpanzee Website and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology website

For easier access, here again the scheduled time for the event (attention: it’s daylight saving time on the Northern hemisphere!): 4 p.m. UTC (Coordinated universal time is not on summer / daylight saving time!)

- 5 p.m. BST (London) 
- 6 p.m. CEST (Leipzig / Berlin) 
- 12 p.m. EDT (New York) 
- 9 a.m. PDT (Los Angeles) 
- 2 a.m. AEST – (Melbourne. Sorry, it’s very early!)

The board will open on April 25th a few hours before the AUA starts so that you can post questions before the event starts if you want. If we don't get to your question during the AUA we will be sure to get to it in the days that follow and, of course, you can always ask chimp-related and other questions at the regular “Questions for the science team” board

***UPDATE***
Thanks everyone!! Those 2 hours FLEW right by!

What an awesome experience and thank you so much for the amazing questions and your participation! You can check out the whole AUA here: https://talk.chimpandsee.org/#/boards/BCP000000u

Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften 2016

If you are in Leipzig tonight come visit us at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology during the Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften 2016!!

We have 2 Chimp&See battle-stations set-up and look forward to seeing you!

Chimp&See in the Max Planck Society journal

Some love for Chimp&See from the Max Planck Society journal via @aphorisma (Barbara Abrell) on twitter - Dankeshoen! (https://twitter.com/aphor…/status/631043638953422848/photo/1)