Citizen science projects have a surprising new partner--the computer

For more than a decade, citizen science projects have helped researchers use the power of thousands of volunteers who help sort through datasets that are too large for a small research team. Previously, this data generally couldn't be processed by computers because the work required skills that only humans could accomplish. Now, computer machine learning techniques that teach the computer specific image recognition skills can be used in crowdsourcing projects to deal with massively increasing amounts of data--making computers a surprising new partner in citizen science projects. The research, led by the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, was chosen as the cover story for the most recent issue of the British Ecological Society's scientific journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution. These camera traps are remote, independent devices, triggered by motion and infrared sensors that provide researchers with images of passing animals.