Good news, bad news, good news, 2015 edition

It’s been quiet here on the blog, but we’ve been busy behind the scenes. In 2014, we revamped our data management procedures and structures. Season 7 — the one you finished classifying most recently — was the first where images and metadata were fully pre-processed and vetted before being sent to the Zooniverse. This pre-processing makes things much easier on us after we get all your classifications back from Zooniverse. But it does add some lead time.

Season 8 is the first good news. We’ve been pre-processing all December, finding weirdnesses like 84 images in a row all with the same timestamp, miscellaneous video files, timestamps from the future, and so forth. We are just about to start sending the images to Zooniverse, a processes which takes a few days. You should see Season 8 up within a couple weeks. We’ve also tweaked the interface a tiny bit. More on that soon.

The bad news is bad. After waiting since August for a reply from the National Science Foundation about our most recent grant proposal, we finally got it at the very end of December: declined. That means that we are again scrambling to find funds to keep the cameras rolling for 2015. And this time without much warning.

Season 8 is the first half of 2014 and Season 9 is the second half of 2014. Those are already in the bag. The cameras are rolling right now, and so there will be at least something of a Season 10. Worst case scenario is that we have to shut everything down for a while until we get more funding. But Craig is working hard to find interim funds.

The other good news is that we’ve been talking with some other Serengeti researchers who have set up a small camera trap survey in the western part of the ecosystem. They have tons of images and we’re talking with them about putting their images up on Snapshot Serengeti for classification. These images would be of new locations in the Serengeti and potentially a few new animal species. Could be a lot of fun. So even if there’s a pause in our image collection, hopefully we’ll have these other images to classify from the Serengeti that will be useful for ecological research.