Welcome to GreenToadstool!

 You, our absolutely incredible citizen scientists, got through the SoaringLeaf speciesID workflow SUPER FAST and before the end of the year!

...So...

We opened a new site: Welcome to GreenToadstool!

more here: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/sassydumbledore/chimp-and-see/talk/2279/1756848

First Chimp&See Paper (and new PanAf paper): Chimpanzee Identification and Social Network Construction through an Online Citizen Science Platform

Our first ChimpandSee.org paper! 

We find that citizen scientists can reliably identify chimpanzees from camera trap videos. 

McCarthy MS, Stephens C, Dieguez P, Samuni L, Després-Einspenner ML, Harder B, Landsmann A, Lynn LK, Maldonado N, Ročkaiová Z, Widness J, Wittig RM, Boesch C, Kühl HS, Arandjelovic M (2020) Chimpanzee Identification and Social Network Construction through an Online Citizen Science Platform. Ecology and Evolution doi : 10.1002/ece3.7128

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.7128

Video abstract:

Abstract:

Citizen science has grown rapidly in popularity in recent years due to its potential to educate and engage the public while providing a means to address a myriad of scientific questions. However, the rise in popularity of citizen science has also been accompanied by concerns about the quality of data emerging from citizen science research projects. We assessed data quality in the online citizen scientist platform Chimp&See, which hosts camera trap videos of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and other species across Equatorial Africa. In particular, we compared detection and identification of individual chimpanzees by citizen scientists with that of experts with years of experience studying those chimpanzees. We found that citizen scientists typically detected the same number of individual chimpanzees as experts, but assigned far fewer identifications (IDs) to those individuals. Those IDs assigned, however, were nearly always in agreement with the IDs provided by experts. We applied the data sets of citizen scientists and experts by constructing social networks from each. We found that both social networks were relatively robust and shared a similar structure, as well as having positively correlated individual network positions. Our findings demonstrate that, although citizen scientists produced a smaller data set based on fewer confirmed IDs, the data strongly reflect expert classifications and can be used for meaningful assessments of group structure and dynamics. This approach expands opportunities for social research and conservation monitoring in great apes and many other individually identifiable species.

Visit us at ChimpandSee.org and participate in citizen science!

 

Another site is finished – Twin Oaks in the beautiful Loango National Park in Gabon

Last week, volunteers finished classifications in all three workflows for the Twin Oaks site in Gabon. This site was pretty special. First, it was just a beautiful forest landscape with many fancy birds, great elephant footage, and far more leopard sightings that we ever had at any site before. The elephant and leopard mini-projects are still gathering evidence for individual identifications to know more about the number and demographics of these species at Loango National Park, so get involved here, if that’s your passion.

The Chimp&See leopard mini-project aims to identify individual leopards by comparing their unique coat patterns.

Secondly, the site was pretty special in terms of chimpanzee sightings and discussions. The camera traps had been set up in collaboration with the Loango Chimpanzee Project, directed by Simone Pika and Tobias Deschner. The Loango Chimpanzee Project studies chimpanzee behavior and ecology in the Park since 2005 and habituated the Rekambo community that was also targeted by the Chimp&See camera traps. A recent finding of the project that made the news shows that chimpanzees crack tortoises open to eat them. 

Because of this collaboration, we had the chance to discuss with a researcher, Alessandra Mascaro, and Chimp&See citizen-scientist moderator Heidi Pfund about individual chimps that Alessandra knows intimately from her fieldwork. That means, we did not really discuss possible matches, but rather perspectives and identifiable traits of known chimpanzees. This “reverse matching” resulted in a steep learning curve for everyone involved and provided some new matching perspectives, but also caveats, for other sites where we typically discuss unknown chimps from just the camera trap footage. Another interesting part of these discussions were known family relationships and life stories of the chimps, even if that meant to know that a certain individual died during or after the study period. 

Finishing Twin Oaks doesn’t mean that we’ve run out of work. We started a two-months “chimp matching challenge” to finish the huge Xenon Bloom site. Become part of the team and help us identify all chimps and annotate the videos. We also opened a new site “Soaring Leaf” in West Africa, if you’re more drawn to the general “Species ID” workflow. 

Get involved at chimpandsee.org and thanks a lot for all your help on behalf of the Chimp&See science team!

New Dragonfly is finished – here the highlights!

With the help of many volunteers, we finished classifications last week at our West African site “New Dragonfly”. We annotated not only all subjects in general Species ID workflow, but also identified all “trotters” (hoofed animals) and primates to the species level. Thanks to everyone involved for the great effort! 

What did we find? On the species level, we've seen waterbucks for the first time, many bushbucks close to the camera, and burly giant forest hogs. A special highlight for many has been the rich footage of pangolins and aardvarks in the wild. We do see them rarely and New Dragonly offered some really close looks. 

 

On the chimp side, we are not quite done with matching all individuals seen and you are still invited to help with chimp identification at New Dragonfly. We already identified some very special chimps, like wonderful Grace here with her infant, but would love some input in discussions about the juveniles and some special males. Easiest to get involved is by following the link above and read the pinned discussions that have open proposals (marked with **), watch the videos and chimps in question, and tell us what you think. 

Grace with her yet unnamed infant discovering the camera. Her unique face helped with identification.

 

The chimps at New Dragonfly showed us plenty of tool use to collect ants with very fine sticks and delicate handling to avoid any biting, as well as honey extraction with long, sturdy sticks to gather honey from beehives in tree holes and underground nests. The tools are used here to open bee nests (e.g., by pounding) and to collect the honey. The chimp family in this video shows how it is done. 

 

If you are not into chimp matching, Chimp&See has three workflows on a very special site at Gabon's Loango National Park - called Twin Oaks - open, where you can help annotate within the general Species ID workflow or specialize in primates or trotters identification. You can find the Loango Chimpanzee Project also on Twitter and Youtube.

If you aren't volunteering with us yet - please get involved and annotate African wildlife at Chimp&See!

New PanAf paper: Chimpanzees show greater behavioural and cultural diversity in more variable environments

An international team of researchers led by Ammie Kalan and Hjalmar Kühl of the Pan African Programme: the Cultured Chimpanzee (PanAf) at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology compiled a data set combining fieldwork conducted by the PanAf at 46 field sites, plus an in-depth literature search on chimpanzee research. For 144 chimpanzee social groups they investigated the long-standing question of under which environmental conditions chimpanzees acquire more behavioural traits. They used their unique dataset to test whether chimpanzee groups were more likely to possess a larger set of behaviours if they lived in more seasonal habitats or habitats where forest cover repeatedly changed over the last thousands of years. The behaviours largely included tool use and more than half have been described as cultural in previous studies.

Press Release HERE

Original Paper HERE

citation:

Kalan AK, Kulik L, Arandjelovic M, Boesch C, Haas F, Dieguez P, Barratt CD, Abwe EE, Agbor A, Angedakin S, Aubert F, Ayimisin EA, Bailey E, Bessone M, Brazzola G, Buh VE, Chancellor R, Cohen H, Coupland C, Curran B, Danquah E, Deschner T, Dowd D, Eno-Nku M, Fay JM, Goedmakers A, Granjon AC, Head J, Hedwig D, Hermans V, Jeffery KJ, Jones S, Junker J, Kadam P, Kambi M, Kienast I, Kujirakwinja D, Langergraber KE, Lapuente J, Larson B, Lee KC, Leinert V, Llana M, Marrocoli S, Meier AC, Morgan B, Morgan D, Neil E, Nicholl S, Normand E, Ormsby LJ, Pacheco L, Piel A, Preece J, Robbins MM, Rundus A, Sanz C, Sommer V, Stewart F, Tagg N, Tennie C, Vergnes V, Welsh A, Wessling EG, Willie J, Wittig RM, Yuh YG, Zuberbuehler K, Kühl HS (2020) Environmental variability supports chimpanzee behavioural diversity. Nature Communications 11 (4451) doi: 0.1038/s41467-020-18176-3

Rainforest Redux virtual seminar series with Dr. Ammie Kalan

On Wednesday, June 24th 2020, Chimp&See science moderator Dr. Ammie Kalan gives an online talk about Chimpanzee diversity across their range and her research within the PanAf (which Chimp&See is a part of) at the Max Planck Institute for Science of Human History (MPI-SHH) in their Pan-African Evolution Research Group Monthly Virtual Seminars.

You can listen online via zoom. You need to register (please be aware that it is a two-step registration process) via e-mail: pan-ev.seminars@shh.mpg.de.

It’s at 5 p.m. CEST

Here a link to the flyer: https://www.shh.mpg.de/1738610/rainforest-redux-2020.pdf

Update (2020/06/29)

If you missed this talk by Ammie Kalan, there is a second chance to listen to her on Tuesday, June 30th, also at 5 p.m. CEST, on youtube. There will be a livestreaming at the Primate Conversations Seminar Series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sGVAaXo0nw.

No registration needed. Just tune in!

A Pan-African Perspective: Chimpanzee Behavioural Diversity across their Range

The Pan African Programme: the Cultured Chimpanzee ('PanAf') began in 2010 and has used a standardized protocol for collecting data on wild chimpanzees at more than 40 sites across equatorial Africa. All chimpanzee communities studied to date were unhabituated to researchers at the time of data collection therefore remote camera-trap devices were the primary method for recording behavioural observations. Using such an approach, the PanAf has identified new behavioural variants in wild chimpanzees and has recently described unprecedented cultural complexity in community-specific termite fishing techniques. By combining PanAf data with what we already know about chimpanzees, we also demonstrated that just as wild populations are declining, both behavioural and cultural diversity are similarly threatened across their range due to increasing anthropogenic disturbance. Combined, this research highlights the need for widespread conservation efforts to encompass a variety of wild populations if we are to ever know the true extent of chimpanzee cultural diversity.

The talk will be available later at the same URL in case you can't make it to the livestream.

Update (2020/07/04)

Facebook AI/PanAf collaboration update - Densepose: AI for orienting humans (and chimps) in space

We're happy to announce the results from our first collaboration with facebook AI where they used the PanAf chimpanzee videos to test whether their Densepose algorithm could retrain itself to identify the planes of a new species. Originally Densepose was trained on human videos and can identify an individual's horizontal and vertical planes - so it can identify what is the front and the back, the left side and right side, and  the top and bottom of various body parts, which all move together to document how a person (or chimp) is moving.

In the example below you can see:
Top left panel - a still from the original video with 2 chimps
Top right panel - each of the body parts that can be detected by Densepose, head, hand, forearm, upper arm, torso, etc each coded in a different colour.
Lower left panel - the horizontal plane is coded for each body part. For example, the left side of the head is yellow, the right side is blue.
Lower right pane - the vertical plane is coded: the top of the head is yellow and the bottom is blue.

Put all together, the animal can be oriented in space!

For more information, check out their blog post:  https://ai.facebook.com/blog/dense-pose-for-animal-classes-using-transfer-learning