Chicago Wildlife Watch Talk

New Data (starting with winter 2011)!

  • DZM by DZM admin

    We're back!

    100,000 new subjects are up and ready for your attention. And, for a nice change, they're all WINTER subjects! No more leaves for a while... enjoy the SNOW!

    Good luck, everyone!

    (P.S.: We know that this is fresh winter data, empty subjects and all, so there's not a ton going on always. But I have seen a beautiful fox and some domestic dogs. Next week we'll add some more data from more animal-active times as well to balance it out!)

    Posted

  • escholzia by escholzia

    Yay, snow! Being from California, where we have to drive hours to see the stuff (sorry rest of the country), this is a treat!

    Posted

  • escholzia by escholzia

    Did this set go through the prescreening for overly sensitive cameras we discussed earlier? I've already seen several candidates for the "Arthur" of this set - ACH0002wa0 (set off by swingset or cars?) and ACH0003vc7 (set off by trains).

    Update - this data set appears to have only one pic in 50+ with an animal other than a dog or human. I think you're going to be discouraging a lot of new classifiers. Might be better to wait for the new season of 2013+

    Quite a few animals still out and about - deer, raccoons, squirrels, rabbits so far.

    Posted

  • ForestPreserve by ForestPreserve moderator

    Lots of fences in this set for whatever reason. Also a few potentially identifiable locations, kind of like the bargecam from the last set.

    Posted

  • escholzia by escholzia

    I figure they got smarter about where to put cameras since 2011. Less obvious camera placement and less traffic in the set we finished.

    Posted

  • buffalogroveP by buffalogroveP

    YAY !!! new pics ! but i must admit that with the snow outside at the moment here -- I'm not as happy as escholzia about seeing snow pictures 😉 does make seeing animals a bit easier tho.

    Posted

  • camelsamba by camelsamba

    I'm not even a new classifier, and i'm finding it kind of discouraging... so it was nice to see a few photos with animals in the discussion area!

    (although i am imagining voles running around under the snow; they must be what's setting off the cameras! yeah, right...)

    Posted

  • ForestPreserve by ForestPreserve moderator

    Well, aside from critters, there's locations. I figured out that ACH0003ho2 is very near the bargecam, the only location I could previously identify.

    Here's the barge as seen on Google street view: http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=mvtf9v&s=8#.VPKgBS6gvCZ

    Looking at Google Earth historic images, there are sometimes four or five barges in that little slip, sometimes parked three across.

    And lots of trains in the new set! Who doesn't like trains?

    Posted

  • escholzia by escholzia

    Me! I'd much rather tag animals than cars and trains. But counter shows us as already 51% complete - if correct, at least the tedium will be short-lived.

    Posted

  • DZM by DZM admin in response to escholzia's comment.

    ... er... that 51% is overall, unfortunately. 😃 Includes everything we've already done.

    What we ARE going to do is introduce some spring (I think) data to break up the monotony of animal-free images in the winter. We should have that up very soon. But I wanted to be absolutely sure that we got at least SOMETHING up on Friday because the site has been inactive for way too long.

    Keep pestering me; I will get some spring data up soon!

    Posted

  • buffalogroveP by buffalogroveP

    I'm # ing almost every non-domestic animal I see --- tell me if I should stop.. at least with comments - i can share that there are some animals braving the cold and snow in this set 😉

    Posted

  • escholzia by escholzia

    I don't think the hashtags get used for anything - DZM said the current Talk program doesn't allow them to be searched very well. There's a thread under Help about starting a tag group that does allow for labels to be searched. I only # pretty pictures that I want to share or if I want a question answered.

    Posted

  • DZM by DZM admin

    The hashtags are actually really useful. They can't be searched well, but the Tag Group feature actually collects them, exceptionally well. And even where they're less useful to us, they're extremely useful to the scientists... it all gets added to the metadata.

    Basically, it's up to you how much you want to hashtag or not. 😃

    Thanks for asking!!

    Posted

  • ForestPreserve by ForestPreserve moderator

    The problem is there are only 12 recent object comments shown by default. So if everyone tags every squirrel, most of the comments will just get lost.

    I think it's more fun to save comments for the interesting or difficult subjects.

    I don't see how tagging a squirrel you already identified adds much from a science perspective.

    It would be nice if we could slide through the object comments, smartphone-style. Of course, truly searchable tags would also be nice.

    Posted

  • escholzia by escholzia

    I agree with ForestPreserve on both points. If assigning a hashtag to every coyote allowed classifiers to search the entire database for all images with a coyote hashtag, that would be a very different story. I need a better explanation of how tag groups achieve this - I tried to follow the blog post, but it didn't work for me. The researchers don't need the hashtags to ID animals - they already have the species assignments stored in their database.

    Posted

  • DZM by DZM admin in response to escholzia's comment.

    Hm. Let me see if I can help. Try this for me. Try creating a tag group for the hashtag "coyote." It doesn't work for you if you do that?

    Posted

  • escholzia by escholzia

    Yes, it does work -- I see the personal Tag group under Collections. I must have misread the instructions earlier. However, my point is that tagging random pics with "deer" (I get seven pages of deer pics, while there must be thousands in the image collection) doesn't provide scientific value, compared to what the researchers get when they search their database for deer classifications. And tagging common animals means that the interesting hashtags and questions disappear too quickly from the Recent page to be seen unless you visit the page often. In SeaFloor Explorer, the instructions said to hashtag species NOT in the pick lists - IMO that's a better approach. But I don't mean to complain - this is a great project!

    Posted

  • Bonnie123 by Bonnie123

    I've not seen any spring images yet, were they loaded yet? it's rather discouraging to do so many without any animals. I've completed over 1,000 in just a couple of days and seen only about 20-30 animals, not counting the dogs and humans and cars. I can only do that for so long and then I go back to counting wildebeest, etc where at least there are some animals.

    Posted

  • DZM by DZM admin in response to Bonnie123's comment.

    There are 400,000 new images in the system now, but they may not yet be being presented in random order. I'll see what I can do about that today.

    Thanks for your hard work in processing the empty images... They do get discarded very quickly. We just have a lot of them right now. There will be fewer as we move forward!

    Posted

  • ForestPreserve by ForestPreserve moderator in response to DZM's comment.

    Looks like spring has sprung....

    Posted

  • DZM by DZM admin

    It's in! Still a lot of empty images, but we retire them fast!

    Posted

  • Bonnie123 by Bonnie123

    @DZM: Thanks so much for all your efforts in getting some more images loaded for us, it will help us to have a little bit of variety. Thanks again!

    Posted