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.