The largest-ever scientific camera trapping survey, dubbed Snapshot Serengeti, has concluded. Now researchers are asking the public to take on the painstaking task of categorizing and analyzing the animals in each image.
The project was conducted at the Serengeti National Park, and includes a whopping 1.2 million sets of images that include about 40 mammalian species, the University of Minnesota reported.
"This was the largest camera tracking survey conducted in science to date," said Alexandra Swanson, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oxford who received her Ph.D. in ecology, evolution and behavior from the University of Minnesota. "We wanted to study how predators and their prey co-existed across a dynamic landscape. We needed to answer different questions than camera traps had answered previously."
The remote automatic cameras triggered by motion or heat have "revolutionized" wildlife ecology and conservation research, but the "big data" they produced has left researchers overwhelmed.
"If we were only interested in lions and leopards, we could have classified those images ourselves, but with hundreds of thousands of images of wildebeests and zebras, we simply couldn't keep up with the photos being produced," Swanson said.
The researchers teamed up with the citizen science platform Zooniverse in an attempt to get some help on the project. More than 28,000 volunteers responded, and have been helping classify the animals captured by the cameras. So far, 40 separate species have been identified, including rare animals such as the aardwolf, zorilla and honey badger.
"This project is a great example of how citizen science can contribute to real research," Swanson said. "We all know that people are good at pattern recognition, so harnessing the power of volunteers will become increasingly important for ecology studies. We can engage people with no scientific background to help in producing publishable scientific research at a scope and scale that would otherwise have been impossible."
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