When Do Mountain Goats Shed Winter Coats?

We are a harmoniously transdisciplinary team.

Katarzyna Nowak (The Safina Center), PI
Kate forged the 'Mountain Goat Molt Project' in 2018.

Amy Panikowski (freelance scientist), chief photo processor
Amy is our photo processing lead, now testing out our method on photos of other mammals such as moose.

Shane Richards (University of Tasmania), statistical ecologist and mathematical biologist
Shane is our data analysis lead. He and Kate have collaborated on analyzing a number of other datasets over the years including on human-monkey interactions in South Africa and efficacy of using beehive fences to deter elephants from farmers' crops in Tanzania.

Greg Newman (Colorado State University), founder of CitSci.org
Greg assisted us in establishing a dedicated project portal on the CitSci platform and is now collaborating with Zooniverse to help integrate the two platforms.

Aditya Mehta (senior student at Amador Valley High School), AI tools lead
Aditya is using our computing grant from Microsoft's AI for Earth program to develop an efficient machine learning technique to estimate molt from photos.

Sara Beery (CalTech), AI advisor
Sara is honing her expertise in computer vision and providing mentorship to Aditya in machine learning.

Maegan McCaw (senior at Yukon College/University of Alberta), is using photos taken at night (often ones that don't qualify for our molt analysis) to help us understand night activity in mountain goats and if it may be tied to avoidance of the heat of the day.

Advisors to the project:
Don Reid (WCS Canada), Joel Berger (WCS), Jon Beckmann (WCS), Aerin Jacob (Y2Y), Nicholas Young (NREL, CSU)

We thank the citizen scientist community for their contributions of photos to our project and shared enthusiasm for mountain goats especially professional photographer Sumio Harada for sharing his photos of mountain goats from Glacier National Park, Montana.