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Welcome to the "Mountain Goat Molt Project". Help us understand the patterns and timing of winter coat molt in cold-adapted mountain goats.
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When Do Mountain Goats Shed Winter Coats? Statistics
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Message from the researcher
Using photographs sourced largely from members of the public, we are learning about winter coat molt in mountain goats. With your help we can boost our sample of annotated photos to better understand molt in an alpine mammal including in relation to climate warming.
When Do Mountain Goats Shed Winter Coats?About When Do Mountain Goats Shed Winter Coats?
Our project was borne in an offhand fashion in a conversation about whether mountain goats are shedding their coats earlier in the year because of human-induced climate warming. Thanks to that discussion, the question and the method of using photos to address it drew seed funding from several entities including NPS, Y2Y, WCS and The Safina Center. We started amassing photos of mountain goats in spring 2018, and spent summer 2018 in the southern Yukon camera-trapping mountain goats at three locations where they are wild and at the Yukon Wildlife Preserve, which houses two herds, to complement the citizen science data. Working with a photographer, we developed a method, precise but laborious, for estimating molt percentages in Photoshop using pixel counts. Our project drew the attention of both people working in the AI and participatory science spheres. We partnered with CitSci.org to establish a project website where people can upload their mountain goat photos and we also have a project site on iNaturalist where people can add their goat photos to our project. We are now partnering with Zooniverse to 1) help integrate CitSci and Zooniverse platforms using image-based projects like ours and 2) get the help of people like you with photo processing. In the meantime, we are developing potential AI tools with which to compare our by-hand (Photoshop) and participatory (Zooniverse) image classification approaches. Thanks for your interest in our project!