A Team Effort

Snapshot Serengeti has been on the go since 2010 in one form or another and over those years a team of dedicated people has kept it running. The base of the effort is the 225 camera-traps that have been snapping away continuously for that whole period. Of course for that to happen there needs to be researchers and assistants on the ground physically looking after camera-traps, a scientific team who coordinate all data processing and analysis, a management team running the administration of the project  and generous funders to keep everything alive and kicking.

Snapshot Serengeti could also not work without all the thousands of volunteer citizen scientist who generously give their time and energy to classifying all the millions of images, ultimately helping the researchers to answer scientific questions we hope will aid in the conservation of all that we love about the Serengeti.

Here in these blogs we have celebrated all these people but it dawned on me recently that there is one group of people that seem to have been forgotten, our moderators.

Our amazing team at Snapshot Serengeti deserve a special mention. They, like our citizen scientists are volunteers, dedicating their time and expertise for free. Contrary to what some may think they are not part of the scientific team in as far as they are not university students who do the job as part of their studies. No, they are a mixed bunch in terms of back ground and do the job plain and simply because they love the Serengeti and love the project. They spend a huge amount of time online helping other users with their classifications, guiding new users through some of the pit falls they know only too well and sharing their collective knowledge through prompt responses to questions and great information posts helping others with less experience to understand the Serengeti and its wildlife. They also have to deal with the odd, luckily very infrequent, troll which is a thankless task in diplomacy. We are privileged to have such an amazing team and I know that they are greatly appreciated by Snapshot Serengeti’s participants.

So thank you to davidbygott, maricksu and tillydad who have been with us since the beginning and welcome to parsfan and nmw. You Guy’s are the best and Snapshot Serengeti would not be the experience it is without all your help.

Hartebeest through a dislodged camera-trap cover.