Conservation impact from behind your computer

Utrecht students joined a citizen science initiative via the Zooniverse web portal in an afternoon dedicated to helping conservation projects around the world.

Volunteering from the comfort of your home is now possible with tools such as Zooniverse, the largest and most popular platform for citizen science, or people-powered research. The idea is simple. Researchers from all over the globe, collect data for their research projects. Sometimes, there is just too much to be analysed by a single person or research team. That is where citizens, like you and me, come in and help these projects, by classifying all sorts of data.

On thursday the 27th September, FFN Academy Utrecht joined efforts with the project “Cheetahs of Central Namibia” via the zooniverse.org portal to help classify thousands of camera trap images collected in the field. After one hour and a half of looking through the images of Namibia’s wilderness, we managed to classify ca 1483 pictures in total! In the end, each of the participants was able to select their favourite image, a memory of their conservation endeavours.

From dozens of antelopes, to a couple of cheetahs and leopards, and even one black rhinoceros in disguise, the zooniverse party was complete in the first ever citizen science effort hosted by FFN Academy. Hopefully there will be many more in the future!

by Monica Vidal