aboutI am an ecologist surrounded by astrophysicists. My research focuses on how animal behavior scales up to drive the dynamics of natural systems; I'm particularly interested how this plays out at the intersection of predation and competition. Now a post-doc with The Zooniverse (www.zooniverse.org), I'm based in the University of Oxford's Astrophysics Department. I work with software developers, data scientists, and an interdisciplinary team of researchers to develop tools that enable us to use the power of citizen science to understand the world around us.
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Technology is changing the way that scientists collect data.
Citizen science is changing the way we turn that data into discovery.
Citizen science is changing the way we turn that data into discovery.
carnivores
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I completed my Ph.D. in 2014 with Dr. Craig Packer at the University of Minnesota's Lion Research Center. Most of this time was spent in Serengeti National Park, digging my way out of aardvark holes and trying to defend camera traps from an untimely demise at the jaws of curious hyenas. My research focused on understanding how hyenas, cheetahs, and wild dogs managed to live with lions. Lions chase, steal food from, and even kill these other carnivores. Although hyenas can fight back, cheetahs and wild dogs can't; in fact, lions have long been believed to be directly responsible for hurting cheetahs and wild dogs populations. Combining long-term demographic data with spatial ranging data from radio-collars and camera traps revealed that whereas lions suppress wild dog populations by displacing wild dogs from large areas of the landscape, cheetahs are able to avoid lions on a moment-to-moment basis, accessing vital resources while avoiding aggressive encounters.
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camera traps |
The Serengeti Lion Project currently monitors all Serengeti prides with radio-telemetry. To collect spatial ranging data on the other predators and their prey, however, I set out 225 camera traps - remote, automatic cameras - across 1,125km2. Despite some logistical setbacks (hyenas ate ~40% of the cameras that first year), the data started rolling in, producing hundreds of thousands of images each year. Quickly overwhelmed by the number of photographs, I teamed up with Margaret Kosmala and the Zooniverse to create Snapshot Serengeti, where volunteers from around the world help classify animals from the camera trap images.
Since launching Snapshot Serengeti in late 2012, >40,000 volunteers have contributed >17 million classifications. Anyone, of any age, anywhere in the world, can volunteer. Because we send every image to multiple people, we are able to aggregate the volunteer classifications to produce expert-quality data. We recently published the first three years of Snapshot Serengeti data: images, raw volunteer classifications, and the final "aggregated" dataset. You can read popular media coverage of the project in the New Yorker, BBC, Wired, LA Times, Washington Post, and more. |
citizen science |
I am now a post-doctoral researcher with the Zooniverse team at the University of Oxford, and I hold a Junior Research Fellowship with Wolfson College. Most of my current research explores ways to integrate citizen science with emerging technology to tackle enormous volumes of data and expand the scope and scale of ecological research.
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