Forget me not 🌼

I´m afraid this one is not going to be the most didactic text I will write. It´s not even going to be about elephants, chimps or animal welfare actions. In fact, this is about passion, friendship, fellowship, self-confidence and finding my own way.

It was only five years ago when I received a link telling: “hey, this might be something for you 😉 “. It was Ingo from Africa sending me a link from the PanAf team asking for help to code videos recorded by camera traps located all over the chimpanzee natural range in Africa - sounds familiar?

Right at that time I was experiencing quite a frustrating professional moment in Germany, you know, when you feel like “I love being a mother, I love my kids, I know I do a great job…but I need to feel professionally complete”. So this was the right moment…the big moment! I still remember when I got the videos to be coded and a short letter from Mimi saying:

    “Dear Nuria, thank you so much for your help coding videos for our project! Welcome to the PanAf team!”.

Welcome! PanAf team!!!! YAY!!!! Can you believe it? I had no idea what I had to do or even if I was qualified to do it, but I knew that I wanted to do it and that I was going to do all my best, about that I was absolutely sure!!

I´m going to tell you a secret: ever since I was a child I wanted to be like Dian Fossey. Remember the film “Gorillas in the mist” when she introduces herself to the professor who searches for volunteers to do gorilla censuses in Africa? after he asks her what she knew about Gorillas she replies: nothing, but I can count”. Isn´t it great? That´s exactly what I believe it´s all about: it´s about wanting to, about having passion for what you do…and if you work with all your heart and put all your dedication and trust in what you do, the knowledge will come easy.

I´m not going to lie, this wasn´t always an easy pathway. In fact, I felt very unsure, overwhelmed and scared at times, which I think made me a stronger woman now. But you know what? When you have the best working team of the entire world, what can go wrong? Even though I have been working remotely, my team/friends have always made me feel that I belonged to the group, and that they considered me as a part of the project. Now I´ve grown as a person and as a professional, and they incredibly helped me with this.

I already had had my experience as an ecologist, but never in my whole years of University and later jobs had I learnt so much about wildlife, ecology, conservation…and of course working remotely helped me catch up on computer things, from writing to reading formal emails properly (oh God, I didn´t even know what ASAP in an email meant!!)…and have a look at me now, I am a blogger!💪

Then came C&S. C&S…I owe you guys soooo much! You won´t believe it. From each and every of you I have learnt how to coordinate a team, how to work tidily, how to be patient and rigorous. And how to be humble and always bear in mind that it´s absolutely fine if I make mistakes. And this specially I owe to Mimi, who has been so empathic and encouraging even when I did crap. These last five years have been the greatest, most rewarding professional years in my life, and at that point of my life I wasn´t expecting that; what a beautiful surprise, my job, my love, my passion…my life.

Although I think of all the possibilities that will for sure come now for me and that I´m ready for a new and exciting phase in my life, I feel tremendously sad for leaving and can´t help my tears from falling while I write this.  I´m going to miss you guys, all of you! I and the PanAf team have so much to thank you all volunteers! You have been doing an awesome job. We can never thank you guys enough in the name of conservation. In this crazy world with so many ecological challenges in sight, what we did for species protection has no price, really, and I am f… proud of us!

I hope our paths will cross again, at some point, at some place…

                                                                          Hey, we did a great job together 😊

       

Germany, 2016

Spain, 2019

“MonkeySee” – primate mini-project: A big thank you and a little sneak preview

Although Chimp&See has its main focus on chimpanzees, other species, especially other primates, play an important ecological role in the African rainforest and their presence can be an indicator of biodiversity and potential disturbances at a site. The current Chimp&See annotation interface only supports the classification of monkeys in the broad category “other primates”. From site to site many different species of monkeys and even other primates like galagos and pottos are summarized here. These classification data do not allow differentiating species or giving any indication about the occurence of rarely seen species, like the endangered Western red colobus.

Early on in Chimp&See, we asked all volunteers to tag all species they can identify to the species level to improve the information that we get from the classification stage. We thank all volunteers who took this time over the years and engaged in ID discussions with the moderators and the science team for some rather difficult cases!

In addition, we used the current hiatus on Chimp&See to gather some very (very!) dedicated volunteers to finish tagging all primate videos and check hashtags and comments. As approximately 50% of our clips have been tagged during the site classifications, this adds to several thousand video clips! A very special thanks to @Batfan, @Corcaroli, @HeikeW, @midnightsun and @Snorticus, as well as the moderators coordinating this mini-project.

From left to right: Western red colobus, sooty mangabey, blue monkey, and olive baboon

These data can now be used to study single species of interest, their behaviors like reactions of baboon to our camera traps in our “Animal Selfies” mini-project and even potential interactions with chimpanzees like scavenging of leftover nuts from chimpanzees nutcracking sites by sooty mangabeys.

And we have good news for all the primate fans among you! The science team decided to use the current relaunch of Chimp&See (in progress) on the Zooniverse Panoptes Project Builder to integrate a new workflow dedicated solely to monkeys and prosimians (galagos and pottos) into Chimp&See. This new workflow that aims to identify all primates to the species level already during classification, leaving room for tagging exemplary videos and interesting behaviors and thus saving time. Stay tuned for the new Chimp&See interface!

Again pant hoots and thanks to everybody engaged in this mini-project “MonkeySee”!

We're out of data - for now!

Hi everybody!

We're out of data - for now! Panthoots and thanks to everyone who helped us finishing classifications on the most recent Green Snowflake site. Chimp matching is still ongoing for Green Snowflake and several other old sites like the memorable Restless Star site. The science team and the moderators will use the hiatus to clean up all finished Chimp&See sites. If you want to get involved shoot us a message.

A new site and many more along the way will start on a shiny new interface in early 2019.

If you want to get involved in the ongoing chimp matching or help us tag the classified monkey videos to the species level for our ongoing "Monkey See" project please visit our discussion pages on Talk. The mini-projects Animal Selfies and Leopard Identification will run in the background until the switch too. If you want to discuss something - the discussion boards are regularly checked and you will get a response!

Pictured here: our "drama queen" Petra from the Green Snowflake - a summary posting from the Green Snowflake site will follow soon!

Thank you so much and stay tuned for the next site on the new interface!

Chimp&See will soon be paused till 2019 but chimp matching will still continue on Talk!

Hi everyone!

We have been revamping the chimp&see site to move to the new Zooniverse platform and make a lot of improvements along the way

We are working on making some of the workflows more fun, easier and more tailored to what people like to do :) and best of all, we'll be adding versions of the site in more languages!

While we go through this process we've decided to pause videos going up on chimpandsee.org [after this current set is done] but there will still be lots of discussions going on, on talk.chimpandsee.org to do chimp matching and chimp naming! Our amazing mods have been incredible in committing to finishing up all the pending chimpIDs so we can move forward with a clean slate and no more back log!

We will need your opinions on chimp matching and look forward to having you around Talk during the main platform pause!

New to chimp matching? check out this awesome how to video and then get started here: https://talk.chimpandsee.org/#/boards/BCP0000007/discussions/DCP00002pu

and check out this amazing chimp identification guide and quiz from BBCOne:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1XYlD34lc2hhVtgK2rWZnNc/chimp-id-guide

and if chimp matching isn't your thing - we hope to see you back in January for a big new set of videos to annotate!

Thank you so much for your contribution so far and looking forward to working together with you in the future!

Pant hoots to you all!

~The PanAf and ChimpandSee team

What can we learn about chimpanzee groups from camera trap videos?

Hey Chimp&See enthusiasts! We recently published a paper about estimating chimpanzee group characteristics using camera traps, and I would like to take the opportunity to share our findings with you and give a little information about what these results mean for the work we do on Chimp&See. 

Our paper, entitled “An assessment of the efficacy of camera traps for studying demographic composition and variation in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)”, was recently published in the American Journal of Primatology.

Photo credit: MPI-EVA

Have you ever wished there were a way to know whether the camera traps actually record everything that’s going on when chimpanzees are present? Have you sometimes wondered whether more chimpanzees are just off camera nearby? Have you noticed how some individuals rarely seem to appear on camera, but others pop up in loads of different clips?

In this study, we were able to compare who appeared on camera to who was actually present, and to determine whether the camera traps were a good way to identify all chimpanzees and measure seasonal variation in party size. We looked at this by comparing two data sets from the same chimpanzees at Taї National Park, Côte d’Ivoire, recorded at the same time. One data set came from camera trap videos while the other came from direct observational data collected by researchers (which we know to be a good reflection of which chimpanzees were actually present and how big the parties actually were). By comparing the data we got from both sources, we found a few key things…

1)    We missed a lot of individuals in the camera trap videos!

If we considered the sum of all individuals recorded together in a given camera trap event, we missed about half of the party on average. So when we view clips on Chimp&See (especially individual 15-second clips), it’s good to always be aware that we’re often glimpsing through a small window into a bigger, more complex scene that’s unfolding out of view. This is a good reminder not to assume too much as we watch chimpanzee clips.

2)    Despite missing some information, we’re still getting really cool and useful data!

Chimpanzee party sizes tend to vary seasonally, based on factors like resource availability and the presence of estrous females. In this study, we found a similar pattern of seasonal variation in party size in both the camera trap and observational data, despite the fact that camera traps often missed some members of the parties. This highlights how useful the camera trap data can be despite incomplete information, and lets us know that the Chimp&See data also offer the potential to look at party size variation in all sorts of ways. So in case you’re wondering, all that chimpanzee counting you’ve done is still extremely useful!

3)    Those chimpanzee IDs are so valuable!

We also looked at whether all individuals appeared on camera eventually, and whether events like immigrations, emigrations, births, and deaths could be detected in the camera trap data. We found that all chimpanzees except a newborn infant born near the end of the study appeared on camera, and that deaths and an emigration were detected via disappearance from the camera trap data. We could accurately figure out the chimpanzee community’s composition based on the camera trap data, too. This information all relied on the chimpanzee IDs assigned in the videos (in this case, by researchers who were directly familiar with the chimpanzees, having studied them). On Chimp&See, the only way to obtain this very valuable information is via the agreed-upon chimpanzee IDs that citizen scientists like you help provide. This information is extremely valuable to the project, and the only way we can answer some critical questions about the chimpanzees you see on video—a HUGE thanks to you! 

Overall, this study gives us some insight into how valuable camera trap data are for understanding chimpanzee communities, as well as shedding light on the ways in which we should be careful when considering what we can get from the videos. We’re so grateful for all the ways you’ve contributed to Chimp&See and can’t wait to share more results with you in the future! Keep up the great work!

New paper: An assessment of the efficacy of camera traps for studying demographic composition and variation in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)

New seminal paper from the PanAf's Maureen McCarthy and colleagues at the Tai Chimpanzee Project

An assessment of the efficacy of camera traps for studying demographic composition and variation in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajp.22904

Abstract
Demographic factors can strongly influence patterns of behavioral variation in animal societies. Traditionally, these factors are measured using longitudinal observation of habituated social groups, particularly in social animals like primates. Alternatively, noninvasive biomonitoring methods such as camera trapping can allow researchers to assess species occupancy, estimate population abundance, and study rare behaviors. However, measures of fine‐scale demographic variation, such as those related to age and sex structure or subgrouping patterns, pose a greater challenge. Here, we compare demographic data collected from a community of habituated chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) in the Taï Forest using two methods: camera trap videos and observational data from long‐term records. By matching data on party size, seasonal variation in party size, measures of demographic composition, and changes over the study period from both sources, we compared the accuracy of camera trap records and long‐term data to assess whether camera trap data could be used to assess such variables in populations of unhabituated chimpanzees. When compared to observational data, camera trap data tended to underestimate measures of party size, but revealed similar patterns of seasonal variation as well as similar community demographic composition (age/sex proportions) and dynamics (particularly emigration and deaths) during the study period. Our findings highlight the potential and limitations of camera trap surveys for estimating fine‐scale demographic composition and variation in primates. Continuing development of field and statistical methods will further improve the usability of camera traps for demographic studies.

Chimp&See on German TV mdr

A big Dankeschoen to German TV station MDR - Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk who did a segment on Chimp&See this week!

Features some really nice video from chimpandsee.org and the chimp matching tutorial our mod Kristeena made!

You can check out the video here: https://www.mdr.de/wissen/video-218832.html

Don't forget to tag all your favourite videos with #dailyzoo and check out the chimp matching tutorial here if you need a refresher: https://youtu.be/PZHb3yPGKm0