Calling citizen scientists

A daring new project aims to map all Africa's mammals

EVER heard of the Saharan cheetah? It's so rare it was only captured on camera for the first time in 2009. Photographed by camera traps set up in Algeria's desert badlands by the Zoological Society of London, these animals - thought to be critically endangered with only about 250 left - have confounded scientists.

With so little life about, what do these hardy cats of the sand eat, or drink, for that matter? If it weren't for the wonder of photography, it's unlikely the Saharan cheetah would have been known to the outside world and, perhaps more importantly, conservationists who can secure this extraordinary animal's future.

Now the University of Cape Town's Animal Demography Unit (ADU) has embarked on Africa's grandest mammal-research mission yet: compiling the first-ever atlas of all mammal species living on the continent today.

Dubbed "MammalMAP", the project will not only be unprecedented in scale, but groundbreaking in its approach to consolidating all major research ever conducted on Africa's 920 mammals. Rather than just relying on professional scientists, the project is also calling on ordinary people - from Djibouti to Dakar and Egypt to Elandsfontein - to upload their African mammal photographs to the brand-new MammalMAP database.

"Valuable research is not just being done by specialists and scientists. Anyone anywhere can find out about and photograph mammals in their area," says project coordinator Dr Tali Hoffman. "The ADU database is considered to be one of the most sophisticated biodiversity databases in the world. It enables anyone to become a 'citizen scientist' and get involved in conservation really easily. No record is unwanted. Even low-quality images are fine and will contribute to Africa's biggest mammal-atlassing project."

In the past decade the ADU has published atlases on South Africa's birds, frogs, reptiles and butterflies, culminating in a landmark online database of some 16-million records. These records range from pure data to colour photographs and anecdotes submitted by citizen scientists, and are exactly the kind of details MammalMAP is beginning to amass.

The database has already attracted 5000 mammal records from 70 registered users, which super-smart software has automatically arranged into instantly searchable online distribution maps. It quietly went live in July and was initially only advertised among ADU supporters. Now it's ready to go big.

"It's the mammalian equivalent of Google Earth," says Hoffman, who expects the project to last between three and five years. "There's a glaring lack of studies that map the distribution of mammal species across Africa but, as an open-access database, the project can attract records that run into the millions. Once we've analysed the data, we'll come up with continent-wide distribution maps. This will remain online on an open-access basis, and is also likely to be published as an atlas."

The ADU has also invited conservation organisations and academic institutions working in Africa to contribute their data.

"MammalMAP's aim is not to focus on any single species, like many other projects, but to improve the conservation of all African mammals in a completely unbiased way," says Hoffman. "Its data will become invaluable in the formulation of continent-wide conservation policies and programmes."

The idea for the project was first brought to the ADU by the Cape Leopard Trust (CLT), a non-profit organisation that has used camera traps to study the elusive Cape leopard since 2004. Virtually everything we know about this animal - such as the fact that there are about 25 adult leopards in the CLT's 3000km² study area in the Cederberg - has been collected by this organisation using camera traps.

"The CLT had originally gone out to collect info on leopards, but landed up with 30 000 photographs of animals that aren't leopards, so last year they came to us and said, 'We have all these mammal records. Do you want them?'" Hoffman recalls. "It was a wake-up call that this was a way to consolidate this kind of information throughout Africa."

While the ADU is looking for images shot by any camera type, Hoffman hopes contributing citizen scientists will invest in camera traps, as these can take thousands of unmanned images. A camera trap starts at around R2500, and is an excellent way of photographing the shy and rare. Thanks to these - the bush paparazzi - conservationists have in the past decade rediscovered several species thought to be extinct for up to a century.

"People are sitting on information gold mines with no ultimate conservation outlet, so we've had an overwhelming response from citizen scientists. This is their way of contributing to the greater good," says Hoffman. "If you love an animal, you could be actively involved in conserving it by having fun and just doing what you normally do in the great outdoors."

Visit the MammalMAP database

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