Around the Zooniverse: Chimp&See featuring our mod Laura K Lynn!

After a brief zooniverse site-wide outage last week - we are back!

A big thank you to Zooniverse for putting this great intro video together featuring our amazing moderator Laura ( @LauraKLynn ) , also featured is our incredible field site manager Heather Cohen ( @heathenchimp ) setting up a camera at the current Chimp&See site : Sunlit Ruins !
 

Chimp&See update, March 2021: What's done and what's here!

 Hi everyone

We have started 2021 with a BANG!

In the last months look at all we have accomplished:

• Finished chimp matching at XenonBloom (bye bye algae fishing chimps...for now ;) )
• Finished chimp matching at SoaringLeaf  and our first chimp matching site truly run by a mod and it was a HUGE success - thank you wonderful Heidi/Boleyn!!!
• Opened the new Cameroon-Nigeria chimpanzee site GlowingCloud
• Started GORILLA matching at Green Toadstool - with an all new focus on silverbacks and groups thanks to the great ideas of, and lead by, our mod Anja/AnLand!
• We did some housekeeping at New Dragonfly an identified all the unique chimps there - a big thank you to the scimods Paula/PauDG and Nuria/NuriaM for this big effort!
• There has also been a huge effort at site clean up by our amazing team lead by Karen/Kikilee3 and Lucia/luca-chimp who are taking care of the videos with the need_id tags and wrong tags! Thank you ladies :)
• We have a whole new set of "how to" videos curated by Carol/Eweforia HERE  
• We also have LOTS of new chimp matching tools including all the wonderful mug shots (including butt mug shots) curated by burdock/Libby and Carol/Eweforia
• for the Green Toadstool site check them out here! 

and what's happening now?

• We just launched CHIMP matching at GreenToadstool which features some very exotic blond chimps and some clever honey collection with tools from a central chimp population

A blond chimp! get involved in chimp matching at GreenToadstool to find her again!

• ...We are annotating at GlowingCloud with the SpeciesID, MonkeySee and TrottersID workflows
• We have our ongoing elephant, leopard and gorilla matching projects plus the animal selfies camera reaction and health issue miniprojects. Click on the links to find out more :)

So what have we found?

At Xenon Bloom we named an incredible 92 chimps and found 4 unique chimps for a total of 96 at least, at this site!

At Soaring Leaf we named 21 chimps and found 8 unique for a total of at east 29 chimps at that site :)

We saw a lot of stone throwing and the incredible night time displays of multiple chimps

The three most often seen and recognized chimps (thanks to their unique features) even inspired an epic ballad by TheWeez15/Zaneb aka Sev : Our Leopard-Muzzled Grock

Grock

A big thank you and big pant hoots always to our awesome mod team especially Heike/HeikeW and Zuzi/yshish who are a massive support during these busy times! and as well to our tech support hero Colleen/sassydumbledore, you are THE BEST!

We are looking for new chimp matchers, check out THIS POST and sign up for the team calls :)

Happy Lunar New Year – The Year of the Ox!

Today starts the new lunar year – also called the Chinese New Year, but celebrated in many Asian countries. 2021 is the Year of the Ox and as every year, we want to take the opportunity to highlight the respective species – or a close African relative – from the Chimp&See cameratrap video footage. This year, it is of course the forest buffalo! 

African forest buffalos (Syncerus caffer nanus) are a subspecies of the African buffalo – smaller than the ones you see in the savannahs of South and East Africa, but still impressive in their build. Adults of both sexes have short C-shaped horns that point back. Coloration is dark reddish to brown with an even darker line down the spine and darker lower legs. The ears have adorable black and white fringes. 

In the past five years since we started with your help to analyze our video footage, we’ve seen forest buffalos relatively rarely. This all changed with starting the Twin Oaks (Loango, Gabon) site in collaboration with the Ozouga Loango Chimpanzee Project. The mixed landscape consisting of several habitat types varying from coastal lagoons, mangrove swamps, coastal forest, secondary and primary forest and open savannah seem to be ideally suited for this species. They can graze in the forest clearings and use the wetter habitats for wallowing to keep insects away. They usually have some help with the latter part from yellow-billed oxpeckers cleaning patiently their coats.

Two yellow-billed oxpeckers cleaning a forest buffalo's fur. Original video here.

Forest buffalos are seen at night and day. They sometimes discover our cameratrap and react to this in different ways. Please enjoy some video highlights from our forest buffalos, have some good Asian food of your choice, and a happy and prosperous new year!

 

The Best of the best in 2020

2020 has been a difficult year for many and it seems to us that Chimp&See – as other online citizen science projects as well – could provide a little bit of relief and entertainment amongst the turmoil in the world. We had a huge spike in classifications and new volunteers. We are grateful for all the help and support for our project. We love your interest in annotating our wildlife videos from all over Africa, especially the chimpanzees, and your questions while doing so. During the year, we worked on four sites that are in various stages of near-completion and a mini-project. 

The science team also published the first Chimp&See paper in Ecology and Evolution that investigated how reliably volunteers at Chimp&See can identify individual chimpanzees from cameratrap footage only. For this, they compared the matching results of Chimp&See volunteers with chimp identifications by scientists from the same videos. The scientists knew those (habituated) chimpanzees from fieldwork. The results are promising: despite identifying fewer chimpanzees in the videos (only about 50% of the chimpanzees present ended up to be successfully matched to another chimp), the Chimp&See volunteers could reliably identify the members of this “test community”. That means, they identified (nearly) the same number of chimpanzees, but identified each chimp less often. The team created a great video abstract that you can watch here.

Before Christmas, we asked you about your “Best of 2020” – your biggest surprise, creepiest and funniest clips, the best camera reaction, and of course your favorite chimpanzee. We compiled all nominations, made poll, and here are the results from your votes: 

 

Favorite chimp 2020: Freddy - or at Chimp&See called Loango-Freddy

 

 

The funniest video 2020: giant kingfisher vs. bird

 

 

The creepiest video 2020: his gait looks painful, but elephant Hawking is our hero!

 

 

The biggest surprise 2020: no comment needed ;-)

 

 

The best camera reaction: researchers having fun

 

 

If you missed the voting stage, but want to see all nominations – please check out the playlist on our youtube channel (and subscribe for more - we post every Wednesday!)

What will happen in 2021? Well, we have many more research sites coming, needing furthermore your help to annotate the videos to the species level in three workflows: ‘Species ID’, ‘MonkeySee’, and ‘Trotters ID’. Currently, the Central African site Green Toadstool is in the classification phase and chimp matching is starting at Soaring Leaf – a West African site – on January 25th. Check out the intro post, read the instructions, and become part of the team!  

We will also move forward with the leopard and elephant mini-projects in 2021 and start gorilla identification, too.

Thanks to all who voted, nominated, classified, and tagged videos at Chimp&See! We hope to see you around furthermore this year. Please come over and discover the secret life of chimpanzees (and gorillas, and leopards, and all the other critters).

Best of 2020 Poll - Vote now!

Reposted from the Chimp&See Talk discussion by Anja Landsmann (AnLand)

 Hi everybody!

Thanks again for your nominations for our Best of 2020! I had lots of fun watching and preparing the videos for the final poll of the Best-of videos! Now it’s time to vote for the Very Best of the Best!

Here is the poll: https://forms.gle/9hENRRBzbqF1CvRS6

Please choose your favorite video in each of the five categories and submit the choices. The videos are uploaded to youtube and can be watched directly in the survey document or on our youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/ChimpandSee/

The poll ends on January 20th (next Wednesday) and we will post the results – the winner and a runner’s up for each category here and on our blog afterwards.

Thanks for having you here and helping enthusiastically with our project,

The Chimp&See team

The very Best of 2019!

2019 has been a great year for Chimp&See. We re-launched our online citizen science project on the new Zooniverse platform after a thinking, tinkering, and testing phase that took us longer than we had hoped it would. But we finished the beta testing in April, tinkered a bit more, and re-opened the Chimp&See project in mid-July 2019 with two new exciting sites: a savannah-woodland research area in West Africa called “Xenon Bloom” and a rainforest habitat, our first in region B and home of the Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzees called “New Dragonfly”.

The project attracted again many volunteers helping us to classify and annotate our video clips. To date, more than 1,700 old and new volunteers are active and made over 300,000 classifications. We already identified quite a number of chimpanzees (see below for the volunteers’ favorite individuals) and could finally study algae fishing in chimpanzees up close with our cameratrap footage.

So, 2019 was quite a highlight for the team!

In December then, we asked you about your “Best of 2019” – your biggest surprise, creepiest and funniest clips, the best camera reaction, and of course your favorite chimpanzees. We compiled all nominations, made poll, and here are the results from your votes:

Favorite chimp(s): Beatrice and Ozzy

 
After leading the polls right from the beginning our lovely and strong Beatrice has to share the win of the "Chimp of the year 2019" with Ozzy! His votes made a big jump up in the last day. No doubt, he has fans, too. So, we have two winners: Beatrice, a female adult with at least one offspring in tow and Ozzy, an elderly looking adult male, who enjoys his food.

The biggest surprise 

The creepiest clip 

The funniest clip 

And last, but not least: the very best camera reaction 

If you want to see all the nominees check out the nomination playlist or the original Talk thread.

Thanks to all who voted, nominated, classified, and tagged videos at Chimp&See! We hope to see you around furthermore this year. Please come over and discover the secret life of chimpanzees.

Chimp&See's 3rd Anniversary Best Chimp Clips (So Far!)

To celebrate Chimp&See's 3rd Anniversary our sci mod and PanAf scientist Dr. Maureen McCarthy compiled some of the best chimp clips from Chimp&See so far!

If you want to discover more amazing videos from equatorial Africa visit chimpandsee.org !

Best of Chimp&See 2017!!!

Hi everybody!

So here is now the best of the "Best of 2017"!

Thank you to everyone for a fun and successful "Best of 2017" event! There were some really entertaining clips nominated this year, and we hope you enjoyed the chance to revisit them. We loved all your suggestions and findings! Here are the results from the voting!

Favorite chimp!

Winner: Filou Runner Up: Kamala

Best Camera Reaction!

Winner: Puck, the leopard Runner Up: Young chimp loves the camera

Biggest Surprise!

Winner: Falling from the sky Runner Up: The duiker and the turtle

Creepiest Clip!

Winner: Bushbuck Magic! Runner Up: Just creepy!

Funniest Clip!

Winner: Young chimp loves the camera Runner Up: Bushbuck Magic!

You can watch the "Best of 2017" playlist on youtube.

2017 has been a wonderful year with many achievements thanks to you. We finished Aged Violet and Restless Star classifications and chimp matching. We now have a great chimp matching tutorial video [youtube]. We learned a lot about elephants here on the blog and now also with a dedicated Elephant discussion board. The selfie project on chimpanzee camera reactions is still running and we started to identify individual leopards.

Currently a new East African site Green Snowflake is running with many great chimp footage and we will open new sites in the near future. Check it out and get involved at Chimp&See!

The Best of Chimp & See 2016

Thank you to everyone for a fun and successful Best of 2016 event! There were some really entertaining clips this past year, and I hope you enjoyed the chance to revisit them. Now, which ones did you think were the best? Here are the results from the voting!

Favorite chimp:

Winner: 🏆 Kamala 🏆 | Runners Up: Vili and DBInf04

Funniest clip:

Winner: 🏆 Off to school 🏆 | Runners Up: Jonah needs a hug and Still learning the jungle gym

Best camera reaction:

Winner:  🏆 Maryln tries to figure things out 🏆 | Runners Up (tie): Here, get my best side and Mom and baby get a close look

Creepiest clip:

Winner:  🏆 Galagos shrieking in the night 🏆 | Runners Up: The floating head and Ant swarm

Cutest clip:

Winner: 🏆 Off to school 🏆 | Runners Up: Etta and baby playtime and Jonah needs a hug

Biggest surprise:

Winner: 🏆 Jackal's daytime close-up 🏆 | Runners Up: Filou, a male with a maternal instinct and Bespeckled chimp selfie

There we go -- the Best of Chimp & See 2016! Thank you again to those that nominated and voted during the event. Also, a very big thank you to all the volunteers who, one clip at a time, have brought us this far and will carry us on through an undoubtedly exciting 2017!

See you back at Chimp & See!

VOTE NOW for the Best of 2016!

A few weeks ago, we asked you to nominate the best videos on Chimp & See in 2016 in the categories of Favorite Chimp, Funniest Video, Best Camera Reaction, Creepiest Video, Cutest Video, and Biggest Surprise.  It was challenging, but fun, and now it's time to vote for your favorites!

We set up a survey so you can view all the clips and send us your votes.  Based on feedback from last year, we made some changes to make this year's survey a little shorter (it should take about 15 minutes).  It's a great chance to look back over the fascinating and entertaining clips from the last year and share your thoughts on the best of the best.

As you view each video, you have the opportunity to give it a score of 1 (low) to 5 (high). Voting ends on Sunday, January 8th, after which we'll tally the scores to find the winners for each category.

The survey is open to anyone (one entry per computer), so feel free to share this "highlight reel" with your family and friends so they can join in the fun and add their votes, as well!

If you have any problems or questions, please let us know. Enjoy, have fun, and may the best clips win!

🐵 Vote Now!

(You are free to enter scores for as many or as few videos as you'd like, but only one voting form can be submitted per computer.  Votes are anonymous.  Be sure to submit your votes before January 8, 2017, at 11:00pm EST.)

Best of 2016!

Winner for Favorite Chimp 2015

We've had another wonderful year at Chimp & See, thanks to all of our awesome volunteers! As we did in 2015, we thought a "Best of" event would be a fun way to close out the year and share some of our favorite clips with each other. Did you have a favorite chimp in 2016? We saw lots of camera reactions - which was the best? Share the best and most memorable clips of 2016, and then we'll vote!

We want to see the best clips in the following categories:

• Favorite chimp
• Funniest clip
• Best camera reaction
• Creepiest clip
• Cutest clip
• Biggest surprise

To learn more and nominate your favorites, join us in the Best of 2016 event at Chimp & See!

Welcome New Chimp&See Citizen Scientists!

Hi everyone,

We had a nice spike in user and classifications last week - thank you all for your hard work!

November 14th - December 5th 2016 C&S stats

Welcome to all the new citizen scientists and if you have any questions at all please visit us on Talk  where our amazing team of mods will be happy to answer any and all of your questions!

Some other news this week is that Zooniverse has an advent calendar and day 1 marked the start of their photo competition - so please feel very encouraged to submit some of the best video screen grabs that chimp&see has to offer. For some ideas of how to get started if you do not already have a favorite photo visit this discussion on Talk :)

!!! Happy Earth Day and Happy One Year Anniversary to Chimp&See !!!

One year ago today (4/22/15), Chimp & See came to life at Zooniverse.org. Our goal was to engage citizen scientists to help us annotate the thousands of hours of camera trap video footage we have collected as part of the PanAfrican Programme: The Cultured Chimpanzee (PanAf) from across Africa.

Our primary goal with Chimp & See is to better understand chimpanzees, which is why we ask for so much detail from the chimp videos. But it is also important to know the chimpanzee predator density at each site (leopards), the density of certain prey animals (monkeys), the human pressure at each site and the density of species that are food competitors with chimpanzees (elephants, pigs, monkeys and more). These are all factors that directly affect chimpanzee behaviour. Furthermore, we want biodiversity estimates for each site and to ascertain which species make good indicator species for these forests which help us develop better biomonitoring tools. We always anticipated as well to share our data with researchers interested in all the species represented in our camera trap videos.

We are proud and humbled to say that, one year later, our success has been much greater than we had anticipated!

To date, over 7600 Chimp & See citizen scientists have annotated more than 400,000 videos representing over 2.2 million classifications from 13 sites across Africa! And we have identified more than 330 different chimpanzees so far!

We've had some great surprises along the way, from the unexpected species (like our very first West African lions, and the hypnotically-dancing green mamba) to the unexpected behaviours (such as stone throwing, which led to our first paper, goop-eating, and something we like to call 'diddling').  We met some special chimps (like the exotic red-haired lady Roux, the pale-faced Pearl with Flocke her sideways-riding infant, and Dodge, whose disability is outshined by his personality -- also featured in our paper above), as well as a few unique individuals of other species.  And we even learned to speak chimpanzee!

Some "big picture" highlights from this past year include participating in both the Zooniverse Best Practices Workshop in Chicago, USA and the Max Planck Society's Open Science Days in Berlin, Germany and becoming official members of the Bürger schaffen Wissen, Atlas of the Future and European Citizen Science Association as well. We were also featured on Nature.org's Cool Green Science Blog and the Leipzig city portal.

Thanks to the amazing work and initiative of our citizen scientists we have even initiated some very successful mini-projects, as well, including identifying many of the other primate species, and looking at animal camera reactions in our Animal Selfies project.  This work will allow us, and our collaborators, to continue learning from this data for years to come.

"With the help of enthusiastic and engaged citizen scientists, this exciting project has the potential to change our understanding of wild chimpanzee ecology" -- Hjalmar Kuehl, Director of the Great Ape Evolutionary Ecology and Conservation Research Group, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig

We could not have come this far without YOU, our volunteers, supporters, and friends.  Every day, we are excited and amazed by the efforts and enthusiasm you've given to C&S.

The PanAf Science Team wants to particularly thank our amazing Chimp&See volunteer moderators for their incredible support and work this past year. We know that thanks to their passion and commitment that our data and videos are in the best hands possible! The Science Team also wants to thank each and every one of our citizen scientists for their contribution to annotating the PanAf videos. Even if you only do it now and then for a few minutes at a time, we value the time and effort you are giving the project! Thank you, Grazie, Dankeschoen, Gracias and Merci !!!!

In addition to this special day, we decided the celebration should last a little longer... and have prizes!  Be sure to head over to the C&S Talk discussion boards after you finish reading this post to learn about some special chimps that are stopping by to party with us!  Find them all, and you could win your own official Chimp & See t-shirt!  This game will run through the end of next week (4/29), and will take place only on the Talk boards, so keep an eye out for them there!  Good luck!

And with that, we say Happy Earth Day, everyone and thank you so very very much for being part of the Chimp & See Community - we absolutely could not do this without you!

P.S.  If you, or someone you know, is still looking for a project for Earth Day, Chimp & See is a fun and rewarding place to volunteer!  It's suitable for kids and adults, from any location, any time of day, in any weather! Plus, with recent and upcoming improvements to our interface, tutorials, and FAQs, we're making it easier than ever to get started making a difference!  So please share this post or get the word out by following & sharing on Facebook and Twitter!

Gorilla and chimp hugs

Best of Chimp & See 2015!

Thank you to everyone who nominated and voted in our Best of 2015 event! I hope you enjoyed the chance to reminisce over our best finds, and maybe enjoy some you had missed before. But now you want to know the results, right? Without further delay.... (insert drumroll here)...

The Best of Chimp & See 2015:

Favorite chimp:

Winner:  🏆 MFInf20 🏆| Runners Up: Sugar and Abile

Funniest clip:

Winner:  🏆 Duiker log fail 🏆| Runners Up: Diana monkey playtime and Field team dancer

Best camera reaction:

Winner:  🏆 Leopard attack 🏆| Runners Up: Baboon camera adjustment and Chimp goes knock knock

Creepiest clip:

Winner:  🏆 Snake stands up 🏆 | Runners Up: Spider dangles in front of camera and Hypnotic cobra

Cutest clip:

Winner (tie): 🏆  Mom, Dad, and a porcupette and Young mangabey opens wide 🏆 | Runner Up: A kiss from Mom

Biggest surprise:

Winner: 🏆 Elephant excitement 🏆| Runners Up: Dodge's drumming display and Our first lions

And that's it! Thank you again, and now it's time to get back out there and see what amazing chimps, funny behaviors, or surprising scenes you can discover. The hunt for the Best of Chimp & See 2016 is just 11 months away! ;-)

See you over at Chimp & See!

Thank you all and Happy New Year!

It's the last day of the year so we wanted to thank you all for working on Chimp&See with us! Our citizen scientists and moderators are truly amazing and we look forward to a great 2016 with you all, full of new discoveries and fun videos!

A special thank you to the moderators: Quia, Ksigler, AnLand, Jwidness & Yshish for their incredible dedication this year!

Pant Hoots for everyone and wishing you all a great start to the new year!

If you want to see the best videos of 2015 and vote on your favourites like the one of Esme below, go here http://cands.polldaddy.com/s/bestof2015

VOTE NOW for the Best of 2015!

Earlier this month, we asked you to think about the best videos on Chimp & See in 2015 in the categories of Favorite Chimp, Funniest Video, Best Camera Reaction, Creepiest Video, Cutest Video, and Biggest Surprise. Thank you for all the amazing nominations!! Now, it's time to vote on them!

We have a survey set up here where you can view the cream of the crop, according to your fellow citizen scientist volunteers and the science team. It's a great chance to look back over the fascinating things we've discovered this year, and give your input on what is the best of the best. (Don't feel bad about playing favorites -- it's an honor just to be nominated! ;-) )

As you view each video, you have the opportunity to give it a score of 1 (low) to 5 (high). Voting ends on Thursday, January 7th. Afterward, we'll tally the scores to find the winners in each category.

Also, the survey is open to anyone (1 entry per computer), so feel free to share this "highlight reel" with family and friends so they can see how much fun you've been having here!

If you have any problems or questions, please let us know. Enjoy, have fun, and may the best clips win!

🐵 Vote Now!

(Voting takes about 20 minutes, though you are free to vote on as many or as few videos as you'd like. Be sure to submit your votes before January 7, 2016, at 11:00pm EST. Votes are anonymous. One entry per computer.)

Nominate Your Favorites for the Best of 2015!

We've had a great year at Chimp & See, thanks to you, and along the way, you've discovered some really amazing things caught on the camera traps. We thought it would be fun to look back over the great footage from this year and share some of the best! Who was your favorite chimp? Was there a clip that made you LOL or say "eww," or that was totally unexpected? What were the best and most memorable clips of 2015? Share your favorites, and then we'll vote!

We want to see the best clips in the following categories:

• Favorite chimp
• Funniest clip
• Best camera reaction
• Creepiest clip
• Cutest clip
• Biggest surprise

To nominate your favorites, just post a reply to  http://talk.chimpandsee.org/#/boards/BCP000000c/discussions/DCP0000lrf that includes the clip ID (e.g., ACP0001234) and the category for each nomination. The thread will stay open for 2 weeks so you have time to find your favorites, and if you have trouble narrowing it down, it's okay to nominate more than one clip for a category. Then, we'll collect all the nominations, and you can vote on your favorites for all of 2015.

If you have a clip in mind but can't find it, or you want some ideas, here are some places to look:

Your profile -- scroll down to see your favorites or any collections you made
The master list of chimps
The DailyZoo nominations
Other keyword collections -- browse under the behavior tags (like selfie, surprise, camera reaction, playing, etc.) or by species

Sound like fun? Let's get started! We look forward to seeing your favorites. :-D