That was fast!
Thanks to you, we’ve already plowed through the entire “lost season” of Snapshot Serengeti. Granted, it was pretty small – only about 16,780 or so subjects, but you guys really knocked it out of the park.
So, first, let me say THANK YOU for your help!! It’s always such a thrill to announce a new season of data, and then watch that progress bar blast forward.
Second, speaking of progress bars, some of you have noticed that this progress bar went from zero to gone in, well, no time at all. Turns out we had a small bug in our code that meant we couldn’t see the progress bar advance. So finishing the lost season really took us by surprise too.
Third, if you feel like you’ve gone all excited by a new season to classify, only to have it ripped away, I promise that things will get better soon. We’ve now finished the major pre-processing for Seasons 9 and 10, and just need a couple weeks of minor pre-processing/porting to the Zooniverse. We’ll get them up online in early 2016 and you can classify to your heart’s content. Hopefully it will be something to cheer us all up as we return to work after the holidays. Seasons 9 and 10 are both really big, so there’s no risk you’ll miss out on them!
In the meanwhile, if you need an animal fix, Chicago Wildlife Watch could use your help!
Snapshot Serengeti’s “Lost Season”
Over the last few years, you’ve helped us identify almost 2 million photos (since there are often multiple frames per “subject”, that’s actually about 5.5 million individual frames!). And you might remember that a few months ago the first 1.2 million of those were just made available to researchers everywhere. But along the way, a few (thousand) photos fell through the cracks for one reason or another. Some sites didn’t get uploaded because of a quirk in the file structure. Some SD cards were corrupted and only months later the brilliant UMN IT department was able to recover the photos. Whatever the reason, we’ve accumulated 16,780 capture events that we’ve called “The lost season” — and we’ve added those images to the site today!
It’s a bit of a blast from the past — most of the images were taken in Seasons 3 and 4. But they’ve never been seen before…so go check it out! Who knows what you’ll find!
Snapshot Serengeti 