Chicago Wildlife Watch Wants Residents to Explore, Identify City Animals


When we think wildlife, most of us think national parks and far-off forests. But an interactive science project called Chicago Wildlife Watch wants to show us that wildlife is, quite literally, right in our own backyards and outside our high-rise balconies.

Rare birds, foxes and coyotes have all been captured by the project's 120 cameras stationed throughout Chicago. And the project's scientists are hoping to make citizen scientists out of each one of us. 

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Seth Magle, director of the Urban Wildlife Institute at the Lincoln Park Zoo, tells us about Chicago Wildlife Watch and how we can all answer the call of the wild.

The crowd-sourcing project lets anyone with a connected device help local researchers answer questions about Chicago’s urban ecosystem, including where our wild neighbors go, which species are most common and which may be in decline, how they compete with one another, and how humans impact their choices. The story is told with the help of camera traps, small motion-triggered devices set up four times a year at more than 100 locations across the city and suburbs. 

The camera traps used for Chicago Wildlife Watch data collection are set up throughout Chicago and the suburbs. (Courtesy of Urban Wildlife Institute/Lincoln Park Zoo)The camera traps used for Chicago Wildlife Watch data collection are set up throughout Chicago and the suburbs. (Courtesy of Urban Wildlife Institute/Lincoln Park Zoo) Here’s how it works: Users go to the site, click “Get started” and then look at photos of animals captured by the cameras. Buttons prompt users to select what type of animal is in an image – “deer,” “muskrat” and “fox,” for example – before moving on to the next capture. Each camera snaps photos for a month during seasonal setups, and, as anyone who owns a digital camera or smartphone can imagine, the photos pile up quickly.

Developed by the Adler Planetarium’s Zooniverse team, a project partner and citizen-science project developed with the University of Oxford that runs dozens of projects around the globe, the algorithm that powers the classification system helps to prevent false identifications. It's a simple idea: The system looks for user agreement before an animal classification is recorded. That is, multiple people review the same image until the algorithm identifies the appropriate level of agreement.

This type of people-powered research, as it’s called, isn’t reserved for the science-minded, so you don’t need to worry about misidentifying a mink or overlooking an opossum while clicking around the Chicago Wildlife Watch website. Read more about the project and the Zooniverse team.

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