More Good News about Chimp Matching

Hi Chimp&See-ers,

We have had an exciting few months since our last newsletter in August of 2024.

The August Chimp&See challenge was a huge success - thank you to everyone who participated and accomplished a total of 27,291 classifications in the challenge alone and helped us wrap up the Mathematical Treefort (MT) site!

We also managed to wrap up the MT Chimp matching naming 49 chimps (seen in multiple videos) and identifying an additional 6 unique chimps (only seen once) for a whopping total of 55 chimps at that site!

We also are just about done chimp matching at the Sunlit Ruins site - where we have named 12 chimps, and identified 3 unique chimps for a total of 15 chimps so far!

The PanAf (the umbrella project of Chimp&See) also published a new paper in the journal Science in January on detecting local adaptation in chimpanzee populations across their range. We found that chimps have different adaptations depending on if they live in more forested or more woodland-type habitats. You can read our press release about it here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2025/jan/chimpanzees-are-genetically-adapted-local-habitats-and-infections-such-malaria

In late February, we opened a new small site - we call it Black Rock, but you can find out more about under the name our collaborators use: The Gishwati Research Station in Rwanda (LINK: https://gishwatiresearchstation.org/) - this site is full of chimps but we have very few videos overall so it ran in parallel with the Sunlit Ruins site (which has very few chimps, in fact we think we have identified them all already, but a lot of videos still remain). By the time this newsletter reaches you, the speciesID at Black Rock will be done and the monkeySee may be too, but there are still LOTS of chimps to match from there, so join us!

April 22nd 2025 will be Chimp&See’s 10th Anniversary and we are starting to plan something special for that, so stay tuned and we hope to see you at ChimpandSee.org soon! 🙂

Mimi & the Chimp&See team

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 !
 

New PanAf Paper: Local genetic adaptation to habitat in wild chimpanzees

We have a new PanAf paper out titled " Local genetic adaptation to habitat in wild chimpanzees " in Science

You can read our press release HERE

Editor's Summary:

Adaptation to different environments can include responding to a myriad of pressures, from diseases to differences in water abundance. Of the great apes, chimpanzees are most similar to humans in that they inhabit a range of environments from savannahs to rainforests. Ostridge et al. sequenced exomes from 388 chimpanzees using fecal samples to investigate how selection has acted on these animals. Signatures of selection differed by environment, with forest-dwelling chimpanzee populations bearing variants in genes associated with disease resistance. This study demonstrates the utility of environmentally collected DNA in an endangered species and provides insights into adaptation in our closest living relative.

Take the Chimp&See Challenge!

It’s August, and we invite you to take the Chimp&See Challenge!

We are 70% through the Mathematical Treefort site, that’s 53,000 video clips processed so far!

As a (hopefully) final push for this site, we invite you to do 5 classifications each day, every day for all of August! 

If you are already a regular annotator, and that goal seems too easy: set your own target! You could go for 10, 20…50 classifications per day! Pick a number and stay consistent! If you miss a day, double up on the next day. 😀

If you want to participate – sign up here: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/sassydumbledore/chimp-and-see/talk/2279/3401975 so we know to track your classifications for the month. 

Complete the challenge and win Chimp&See swag! (as long as supplies last 😏)

See you at chimpandsee.org!

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

New Chimp&See paper : Highly precise community science annotations of video camera-trapped fauna in challenging environments.

 New Chimp&See paper out in Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation: "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

Visit us at ChimpandSee.org today and contribute to research and conservation !

Matching of other animals

It's always super exciting to find a chimp, gorilla, leopard or elephant, but all animals contribute to the health of the rainforest and identifying them helps us understand ecosystems. It’s not often that a duiker or baboon or even a hyrax stands out from the crowd and can be identified as an individual, but sometimes a health issue or an unusual trait makes them unique. We can learn more about these unique animals if they are spotted multiple times. For instance, it is possible to see if they stay in an area, or manage to thrive despite injuries.

So if you spot a health issue (#health_issue) or an injury (#injury) or a distinctive trait (#atypical), please tag it or let moderator Libby know by entering @burdock and get the chance to name a special animal. If you would like to know more about Other Matchable Animals, go to the new Other Matchable Animals Talk Board.

Here are three that volunteers have found and named:

If you would like to know more about C&S’s Health Issue Mini-project, follow this link on the blue banner on C&S screens.

Libby and the Chimp&See team