Finished! Looks like this project is out of data at the moment!
The final report for this project is now available on the Results page under the About menu. The entire team at the Cheetah Conservation Fund sends its sincere thanks to the thousands of volunteers that helped with this project and to the team at Zooniverse for providing this wonderful platform.
Results
Final Results
The final report for the Cheetahs of Central Namibia project can be found via the following link:
Cheetahs of Central Namibia Final Report
Preliminary results
CCF again sends its thanks to all the volunteers that helped view and identify animals in its camera trap program. All your answers have been downloaded from Zooniverse and sent to the ecology department at CCF’s research facility in Otjiwarango, Namibia. Your data will be analyzed and incorporated into an extensive and ongoing camera trap project that will eventually cover the Greater Waterberg Landscape (see the ABOUT page for a map of this landscape).
So, what about the results? Everything below is strictly preliminary. The ecology team needs to process the data, but since you all helped create the data, we wanted to at least share the raw data that we collected from Zooniverse. Here is a summary of the classifications received by species:
ORYX 525,103
BIRDOTHER 403,445
WARTHOG 358,043
ELAND 263,220
NOTHINGHERE 256,483
BABOON 217,435
KUDU 184,374
DUIKER 66,357
REDHARTEBEEST 38,746
WATERBUCK 32,366
STEENBOK 23,937
LIVESTOCK 23,478
KORIBUSTARD 20,598
BLACKBACKEDJACKAL 18,698
DIKDIK 16,345
AARDVARK 11,516
OSTRICH 9,314
HARE 7,617
BROWNHYENA 7,401
GIRAFFE 5,773
VULTURE 5,746
LEOPARD 4,716
SECRETARYBIRD 4,551
IMPALA 3,334
CHEETAH 3,001
PORCUPINE 2,990
PEOPLE 2,423
BLESBOK 1,997
BANDEDMONGOOSE 1,735
BLACKRHINO 1,674
HONEYBADGER 1,410
KLIPSPRINGER 1,277
DOMESTICANIMAL 1,271
WILDEBEEST 1,130
CAPEFOX 909
SABLE 895
BUFFALO 832
WILDDOG 819
AARDWOLF 812
SPRINGBOK 786
GENET 749
REPTILE 610
CARACAL 543
BATEAREDFOX 490
SERVAL 324
WILDCAT 319
SLENDERMONGOOSE 303
GROUNDSQUIRREL 240
SPRINGHARE 191
POLECAT 186
ZEBRA 186
PANGOLIN 168
Be careful interpreting these results. The number of classifications does NOT represent the physical number of individuals in the study area. Each photo is shown to 10 different volunteers, then each volunteer ‘classifies’ the photo by indicating which animal is seen in the photo. So one photo of a single oryx might receive, for example, 10 classifications if all volunteers correctly identified it. Many of you will also recall that the cameras take a sequence of photos. So a single oryx walking in front of a camera might appear in all three photos. This means that 30 classification votes might be cast for one oryx siting (10 volunteers x 3 photos). What you can conclude from the above set of results is the relative density of the individual species in the area. The team at CCF will process the results to make adjustments and then apply algorithms to draw conclusions. This part of the process will take time and I have asked the ecology team to come back and update this page when their results are made public.
A question came up several times during the project: What was the largest number of species seen in one photo? I spent some time looking over the classification data and reviewing the source photos. The maximum number of species I could confirm was 5 and there were several photos with this many (I did not include the 'bird other' label in this review). Here is my favorite:
Five species, all in a narrow field of view, and with a great close-up of a kudu!