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 :)

Our latest peer-reviewed Chimp&See paper is out!

We are so very happy to announce our latest peer-reviewed Chimp&See paper has been published in Remote Sensing in Ecology and Evolution titled “Highly precise community science annotations of video camera-trapped fauna in challenging environments”

https://zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/rse2.402

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQiuAICI-yg

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!

Thank you!

Mimi and the Chimp&See Team