Counting Giraffes From My Living Room!

By: Junior Giraffe Club member, Aglaia

This weekend I spent time counting giraffes from my living room. You can count giraffes or other animals from your living room too! Not only is this great fun, but your input helps researchers learn more about giraffes and builds your skills as a citizen scientist!

It's easy and fun! All you need is a computer, iPad, tablet or even a phone if you have good eyes. Are you ready to learn how?

First you need to create an account in Zooniverse (Zooniverse.org). Zooniverse is a citizen science web portal that connects researchers with volunteers - people like you and me. There are currently 50 active projects from which to choose. Some examples of current research projects are: Cedar Creek: Eyes on the Wild (classifying pictures of bison in North America), Wild Mont-Blanc (classifying pictures of animals in Mont-Blanc, France), Frog Find (helping research threatened frogs in New South Wales National Parks), and much more!

Zooniverse helps researchers make discoveries, analyze datasets and write up their findings. How does Zooniverse do this? By involving volunteers to go through thousands and thousands of images (like those sent back from Mars or collected by remote cameras) and manually classify the content of each photograph. Zooniverse has 633, 206, 216 classifications to date and 2, 388, 884 registered volunteers.

Once you create an account in Zooniverse you pick a project, go through some training photos and then login when you have time and continue at your own pace.

One of the many projects on the Zooniverse website is "Wildwatch Kenya", which is the project that I am currently working on. The project homepage explains that citizen scientists like myself are helping count, identify and track giraffes by identifying giraffes and other animals in photographs. The photographs are taken by motion-activated cameras placed in northern Kenyan conservation sites.

When the cameras detect motion, the cameras take a picture. You classify the picture the camera took. Some photos have animals, but most that I have classified didn't.

If you don’t recognize an animal, zooniverse has a feature called “Field Guide”. The Field Guide is a list of animals that have been spotted in northern Kenya. If I am confused about the type of animal in a photograph, I look it up in the Field Guide section. For example, I didn't know what the animal below was, so I looked through the field guide. It matched the picture and description of a dik dik in the Field Guide.

This is how I found the names of animals I didn't already know, and learned new animals!

The Anne Innis Dagg Foundation put me in contact with Derek Lee at the Wild Nature Institute. I wrote to Derek Lee and learned about a Zooniverse project they ran called " Measuring Giraffes". In the project the 4,277 volunteers annotated 32,721 giraffe photographs by clicking on body parts to measure lengths. These lengths included ossicone length, neck length and total height. They used math to convert pixels to centimeters using the camera lens focal length and distance to the giraffe. The data is still being analyzed, but Derek shared that it looks like giraffes grow at different rates depending on where they live, and their sex. And, it appears that giraffe males continue growing all their lives!! That is amazing!!

If you want to start classifying, having fun, and helping researchers you should sign up. In case you doubt that you can make a difference when you volunteer your time, just think about the fact that in just 20 minutes I classified 135 photos. 120 had no animals, 10 photos had at least one animal (ONE WAS A GIRAFFE!!) and 5 were photos of livestock.

Here are my favourite animal photos & the photos for this blog post!

Classifying an animal in the picture.

A dazzle of zebras (a dazzle is a group of zebras).

Field guide picture.