Welcome New And Old

Lion pride

So the new Snapshot Safari base camp for Snapshot Serengeti is a month old and teething problems aside all seems to be going well. I just wanted to take this opportunity to welcome all our new classifiers and to say a big thanks to all our old classifiers who have stuck with us. But most of all a massive thank you to our moderators who have worked so hard to make the transition run so smoothly. They have answered all your questions and queries without my back up due to the unfortunate timing of my own African field trip falling during the launch of Snapshot Safari.
It is not the first time Snapshot Serengeti has seen a big change. Some of you may remember its first outing as Serengetilive back in 2011. In those days things where a lot slower, you started classifying by first choosing an individual camera and working through it. There was an option to skip images, leaving them for someone else. Of course what ended up happening was all the hard to identify images and all the no animal grassy images were left to the end so that some people never got the chance to classify any animals.
We then progressed, in 2012, onto the Zooniverse platform and saw a huge change to the way things worked. Suddenly there was a lot more interaction between the scientists and the community. This was when the famous algorithms where developed by Margaret Kosmala and Ali Swanson and their team to act as a fail proof to anyone incorrectly identifying images.
We are all very grateful for their hard work and dedication that results in us classifiers being confident that our guesses won’t mess everything up.
So I hope that you are enjoying this third incarnation of Snapshot Serengeti and can be proud that it has worked so well over the years that it has spawned so many new projects.
My own field trip to Africa is coming to an end this week and I will be back in the land of internet connection. I will then hopefully be bringing you more regular posts and more updates on the project itself and how it is progressing. In the meantime don’t forget to check out our facebook and twitter pages.