Serengeti wildlife has been documented like never before in a collection of new photographs recorded by hundreds of hidden cameras around the region.
Camera traps — where cameras record images after being triggered by motion or heat detectors, photographed more than one million wildlife shots — the largest such survey ever performed. The tremendous quantity of photographs of animals recorded in the wild need to be categorized in order to be recorded for analysis. Researchers accomplished this monumental task using the power of crowdsourcing.
The Snapshot Serengeti project placed 225 automated cameras around the Serengeti and asked amateur scientists for their assistance in identifying the creatures seen in 1.2 million photographs. The research team, along with their network of citizen scientists, found 40 species of mammals recorded by the trap cameras. If researchers on the project were only looking for a small number of species, such as big cats, the identifications could have been carried out by a small group of people. However, recording sightings of dozens of species was a much larger task.
"We all know that people are good at pattern recognition, so harnessing the power of volunteers will become increasingly important for ecology studies. We can engage people with no scientific background to help in producing publishable scientific research at a scope and scale that would otherwise have been impossible," said Alexandra Swanson of the University of Oxford.
Some of the more unusual animals seen by the 28,000 volunteers were honey badgers, zorillas and the aardwolf. Animals were seen in 322,653 of the images recorded during the study. Computerized image recognition of animals in photographs has improved greatly over the last few years, but human eyes and minds are sill superior to artificial intelligence at identifying species.
"The camera trap project allowed my students to measure new aspects of lion ecology that never would have been possible otherwise. But besides the scientific insights, their fantastic success has allowed the general public to help with our research in a meaningful way. It's never been more urgent to engage the general public in the scientific enterprise," Craig Packer of McKnight University told the press.
Researchers hope their study techniques could be adapted by other investigators on future research projects. Analysis methods used in identifying the animals in this collection could be adapted on other projects where similar analysis of photographs is required.
Photography and compilation of images of wildlife from the Serengeti was published in Scientific Data, published by Nature.
