SnapshotSafari vs Snapshot Serengeti: What’s Changing?
The original Snapshot Serengeti platform will be deactivated on February 1st, 2018. There are still images left to classify, so please help us by finishing as many as you can before February 1.
With the launch of SnapshotSafari just eight days away, we would like to share a detailed explanation of the new interface and note a few significant changes. The participation of Snapshot Serengeti citizen scientists and moderators over the past seven years has provided researchers, conservationists, and computer scientists with invaluable information regarding wildlife populations, online classification systems, and citizen science platforms. We hope that you will continue to work with us on the new platform, so that we can continue to expand and improve our methodology.
Here is what you can expect to see on February 6, 2018:
Multiple sites: Moving Beyond the Serengeti
Figure 1. SnapshotSafari Parks & Reserves
As mentioned in a previous blog post introducing SnapshotSafari, Snapshot Serengeti will not be going away. Instead, it will become one of several camera trap sites that volunteers can select. The SnapshotSafari landing page will link to individual pages for each protected area and provide news and updates about the network overall and/or individual sites. The charming wood-panel background will be changed from time to time, showcasing interesting classified images or letting users know which sites need the most help.
When a user clicks on a site such as Snapshot Serengeti from the landing page, they will be taken to a page that resembles Figure 2.
Figure 2. SnapshotSafari interface.
For the initial launch, there will be six sites to choose from. These new camera trap grids are sending us images from Tanzania, Mozambique, and South Africa. For the first few months, we will release additional sites every three weeks, so make sure to check in often to see if a new location has been added. To navigate between the sites, simply log on to SnapshotSafari and select the reserve you’d like to visit. To return to the home page and go into a different site, click the SnapshotSafari tab at the top of the page.
Classification – What’s different?
Good news for those of you who have been with Snapshot Serengeti for years and are used to the classification system: as you can see in Figure 1, the interface will remain mostly the same.
Here’s how it works: A picture or series of up to three pictures will appear on the screen next to the species’ name list. When you click on a species name, a brief description and a few pictures will appear. If a volunteer isn’t sure of the name of the animal, there are a few tools they can use to help narrow down their choices. Citizen scientists can look at examples of tail shape, animal build, the color and pattern of skin/hide, and horn shape to identify the wildlife in each photograph. The “Looks-Like,” tab has changed slightly, providing silhouettes of animals (Figure 3) instead of descriptions.
Figure 3. “Looks-Like” Tab
Once a species is selected, users will still have the option to choose the number of individuals and record any behaviors. While the look has changed, the choices remain the same (Figure 4).
Figure 4. Number of Individuals and Behavioral Information
Have you ever wanted to zoom in on a picture to get a closer look at far away animals? Now you can! SnapshotSafari allows users to zoom in and out, click-and-drag the image, and rotate the image. Some of the new sites have new species, so you can expect to see a few new options on the list of potential species, such as nyala and klipspringer.
There will be several field guides available, providing users with clear images and detailed information about different groups of animals (e.g. deer, birds, predators, etc.). These are always available for reference to help volunteers hone their classification skills and provide information on the most challenging species to identify or distinguish between. Some of these field guides utilized information and images collected on the Snapshot Serengeti discussion pages. A special thanks to those of you who helped collect related images and develop tutorials; know that your efforts have been recognized and contributed to the development of these field guides.
Volunteers still have the options to, “Collect,” and “Favorite” images. After identifying the wildlife in the photograph, one can choose between, “Done,” or “Done and Discuss.” Clicking on, “Done and Discuss,” will take them to the, “Talk” section of each site. More details on the discussion section is provided below.
There are still pictures that need to be classified at www.snapshotserengeti.org. We are hoping to finish these classifications before the launch of SnapshotSafari. If we don’t finish with the remaining images, they will be uploaded in batches to the new SnapshotSafari website in Snapshot Serengeti’s unique page.
Collections & Discussions
UPDATE: The Snapshot Serengeti website will no longer function after February 1st. When SnapshotSafari launches, the main www.snapshotserengeti.org site will be redirected to SnapshotSafari. The talk.snapshotserengeti.org site won’t be changing at all in the short term. In the long term its contents will be archived permanently, including your collections and favorites.
Each site will have their own discussion forums under the associated Talk section. We are happy to announce that users will no longer be taken to a separate site or tab to participate in or read through the discussions; it is all available on the Zooniverse site! If you want to ask a question, start a discussion, or share a cool picture, you can do that by clicking the Talk tab. When you are ready to resume classifying, you just click on the Classify heading to return to the site’s photos.
Our moderators and a group of volunteers have gone through the discussion forums of Snapshot Serengeti, and they selected several discussion topics to transfer to SnapshotSafari. The majority of the Serengeti forums will not be transferred, but will remain on the old Serengeti site.
Where/When can I find out more?
This Wednesday we will start a countdown for the official launch of SnapshotSafari, featuring detailed descriptions of the six new sites being featured in the initial launch. You can also post your questions in the Serengeti discussion forums until February 1st and follow us on social media for updates.
Social Media
Twitter: @UMNLionCenter, @SnapshotSafari, & @snapSerengeti
Facebook: Snapshot Serengeti, UMN Lion Center, SnapshotSafari
Instagram: umnlioncenter, snapshot_safari
Camera-trap Conundrums
You are probably aware that the 225 camera traps of Snapshot Serengeti are set out in a grid pattern, spaced every 1km over a part of the Serengeti National Park. It sounds relatively simple but actually there is a lot of painstaking scientific pondering as to how exactly to set out your camera traps.
Over the last couple of decades there has been much debate as to the best way to design a camera trap study. The main choice, in terms of placement pattern, is whether to place your camera traps randomly or selectively and what kind of spacing/density to use.
Truly random is to grid your study site and then let a computer randomly choose which grid squares to place the cameras. Alternately you can choose a line or grid and place your camera trap at regular intervals regardless of where that may fall, still a random point. With selective placement each site is carefully chosen for a specific feature.
In reality most projects use a mixture of the above methods and the best method is really determined by what your scientific question is. For instance, if you where trying to acess the number of leopards in a given area it is better to place your camera traps strategically in places you know or guess leopards are most likely to pass rather than using a randomised method. However if you are carrying out a census of an area and wish to know what species are present then a randomised grid is ideal.
As I said a mix of methods is often used. Imagine setting out a grid in the comfort of your office on your computer. It looks good, covers a large area and promises good results. Once out in the field you navigate to your carefully worked out GPS reference point only to discover it is slap bang in the middle of a marsh or in a thick overgrown patch of thorn trees. This is where the scientists allow themselves a little leeway. Often they will take the GPS point as home base but choose an ideal spot within a certain radius of this point where perhaps there is a game trail or some other sign of animals passing, thus allowing them to select a good site within the vicinity.
I have recently had experience of this type of placement and I can say the work done in selecting your study site and then laying out your grid onto a map is laborious but not nearly as much as stomping through the bush keeping your fingers crossed that your next randomly selected site will be perfect. Turning up to emplacement three to find a thick tangle of vegetation is a little soul destroying, mostly you wonder if any animal is likely to bother to pass that way. The reality is that you normally find a spot that is better within 10 meters and with some slight pruning of the vegetation the sites can often turn out remarkably productive.
So that is the placement sorted but there is a long list of other agonising variables to consider, what settings to use on the camera trap itself, how many to use and how long to keep them up. Believe me every scientist designing studies deliberates the pros and cons of these factors and worries incessantly about if they have made the right choice. You don’t want to set up all you camera traps and leave them for a few months only to find your set up was not great, something which happened to me recently when I chose to set the camera trap on high sensitivity to make sure I had every chance of capturing the small, fast critters. The problem was it was so hot, 40°c plus, that the ambient waves of heat set the camera trap off almost permanently between 12pm and 5pm leaving me with 2000 images of nothing. I have had to compromise and reduce the sensitivity to avoid all the miss triggers; hopefully it won’t miss too many small things.
Snapshots camera traps have now been up for over 7 years so most of these teething problems have been ironed out. But as with the best laid plan you cannot control everything, the odd camera still malfunctions as I am sure that our regular classifiers can attest to!
Camera-trap
The Sun Spider
Solifuge credit: Jon Richfield Wikimedia CC BY-SA 3.0
When living in the bush in Africa your life becomes attuned to the rhythms of nature. Up with the sunrise, the spurfowl, guinea fowl and francolins won’t have it any other way, their raucous calls start well before the sun is actually visible. Physical work can be done until about mid day and then if possible its best to seek shelter till around 4pm when the sun is at least not high enough to cook you yet still pretty hot. By 8pm its dark so there is nothing else to do but sit back around a fire and let the night envelope you.
I am living so basically at the moment, my clothes are starting to look shabby after two weeks of hand washing in minimal water. I am however improving my skills daily at cooking on an open fire. It is amazing what you can do with a skillet, a pot and bits of old rebar and wire. I may have invented a new dish last night, Christmas Eve, when I conjured up a gemsbok stir fry.
The wood here gives new meaning to the term hard wood. Luckily for me there is a ready supply of wood due to the need for bush clearing on this cattle farm. Just a few pieces are enough to get really good coals glowing to cook over. They use a deep three legged cast iron pot in Africa for cooking stews, known as a potjie here in Southern Africa. I might even try my hand at bread next.
So last night after a good feed, Trev and I sat contemplating the embers whilst watching nightjars and bats hawking what looked like flying termites. It has rained recently triggering the eruption, earlier we watched guinea-fowl, hornbills, starlings, drongos and a whole host of other small birds running back and forth slurping them up straight from the holes before they could even get airborne. There is a constant suzzz of insect noise interrupted by the screech of barn owls and the odd jackal.
Then there is a deathly screech to rival that of the barn owl, what is it you ask? well it’s me. Something has just ran up my leg across my back up on to my head and then dropped down again to the ground between my feet. I am not usually given to screaming like a girl and creepy crawlies don’t usually bother me, but there is nothing quite like the dark to bring out the pathetic in us. So a quick scrabble for flash lights ensues and the culprit is spotted.
It’s a solifuge, otherwise known as a sun spider. Not actually a spider, though belonging to the same class, arachnida, they form an order by themselves, solifugae. They differ from spiders in not having silk glands and therefore do not spin webs. They appear to possess 10 legs but in fact the front most pair are actually pedipalps that act as sensors and aid in feeding. They are voracious predators and will eat anything they can overpower such as spiders, scorpions, insects and invertebrates.
Totally harmless to humans they do however install a lot of fear. This is partly due to two behavioural traits. If disturbed in the day the solifuge will head for the nearest dark place, often the very shadow cast by the human that caused the disturbance in the first place, giving the false impression that the solifuge is running at you in attack mode. Similarly at night they will follow a light source, again, often that of a human with a flash light.
The second trait is that they move like greased lightning. They are constantly zipping from here to there in a frantic search for prey to keep their high metabolism ticking over. They have also been known to take human hair to make their nests.
You are not likely to pick one of these up on Snapshot Serengeti’s camera-traps but if you ever get the chance to observe one of these arachnids going about its daily business it is really very fascinating, if of course you can get over your human fear.
Snapshot Serengeti – Upcoming Changes
*This weeks blog was written by Jamee Snyder, project coordinator and administrative assistant with the Lion Lab, University of Minnesota. She tells us all about a wider a project that Snapshot Serengeti has evolved into and what we can look forward to in the near future.*
Seven years ago, the University of Minnesota Lion Center set out 225 cameras in Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park. These cameras have recorded over 50 species including some of the most threatened species on Earth. With help from over 140,000 citizen scientists from around the world, millions of photographs were reviewed and classified over the past seven years, which provided park managers, conservationists, and researchers with the necessary information to analyze African wildlife population dynamics. This collective effort is a major contribution to ecological research, allowing for the evaluation of long term trends in wildlife populations as well as best practices in conservation management of charismatic african mammals.
A Snapshot Serengeti Camera-trap image
Snapshot Serengeti was one of the first camera trap surveys to document wildlife populations in a national park and is now one of the longest running camera trap surveys in the world. We have learned a lot over the years, from how to keep our cameras safe from hyena jowls to retrieving data from memory cards that have gone through a wildfire. We are continuously looking for ways to improve this project.
Thanks to years of experience, your participation, and help from several organizations in the U.S. and Africa, we are excited to announce that Snapshot Serengeti is expanding into an international conservation initiative called, “SnapshotSafari.”
Don’t worry! Snapshot Serengeti isn’t going anywhere. In fact, it will remain essentially the same as we transition into our new platform. The discussion forums and personal image collections will still be available to current and future users. Now, participants will be able to see numerous other parks in addition to the Serengeti. SnapshotSafari will showcase camera trap images from multiple camera trap grids inside dozens of parks and reserves located in six African countries. Intrepid citizen scientists will be able to choose from various exotic habitats, including but not limited to: the Sand Forests of KwaZulu-Natal, the Lowveld of Limpopo, the Fynbos of South Africa’s Cape, and the Karoo desert, in addition to such remarkable ecosystems as Mozambique’s Niassa Reserve, Tanzania’s Ruaha National Park, Swaziland’s Mbuluzi Game Reserve, and Botswana’s Makgadikgadi Pans National Park.
By incorporating multiple sites, we can ask more complex questions regarding African wildlife populations and the factors that contribute to ecosystem stability. For example, researchers can compare population dynamics of reserves that are fenced versus those that are unfenced, or theycan evaluate the environments that successfully host multiple predator species without depleting prey populations. Researchers at the Lion Center will use this dynamic platform to investigate the cascading effects of large mammal reintroductions and ways to limit direct human interventions while still maintaining stable ecosystems within fenced reserves. SnapshotSafari provides an opportunity for participating reserves to collaborate and subsequently develop the most effective conservation strategies for protecting biodiversity.
We are working hard to get SnapshotSafari ready to launch in January. We just completed beta-testing, and the feedback has been very positive. To all of the citizen scientists who participated and to those who continue to be involved with Snapshot Serengeti, we are extremely grateful!
Now, we need your help to finish classifying the final series of images on our original platform, Season 10, at http://www.snapshotserengeti.org before we initiate SnapshotSafari, which will host Season 11. We are very close to finishing classification of these images, so don’t hesitate to invite your friends and family to take a trip to the Serengeti through the lens of one of our camera traps and classify wildlife. Let’s push this meter to the end!
Stay tuned for an official count down, so you can be one of the first to participate in SnapshotSafari and contribute to our collective knowledge and ability to successfully conserve African wildlife.
Snapshot Serengeti 