Fall 2020 Analytics

Like many other Zooniverse projects, Eyes on the Wild has seen dramatic upticks in user numbers and diversity over the course of the pandemic. I'm sure I speak for many of you in saying that having a project like Eyes on the Wild to work on is a nice break from the "new normals" of 2020 - quarantine, working from home, upheaval in personal and professional lives, natural disasters and everything else. Logging into Eyes on the Wild has stayed the same throughout. You can sign on and know that you'll be able to escape to the woods and prairies of Cedar Creek, that you'll have deer and turkeys and bison to count, and that your mental break is helping our research community to better understand the world that we live in.

From the research side, we've been lucky to be able to continue our work with the trail cameras uninterrupted! As the University of Minnesota and other academic institutions pulled together their lists of essential employees, irreplaceable long-term projects and methods for doing work safely during the pandemic, our cameras kept on clicking. Since the cameras are outdoors, spaced far apart, require only a single person to check them, and work more or less on their own for months at a time, the pictures have continued to roll in! Thanks to your help, we are beginning to have access to the volume and duration of data we need to make progress on analysis.

And you, the volunteers, have continued to classify with enthusiasm! We've seen a jump in users this year - from ~6000 registered citizen scientists in April 2020 to more than 8500 at the end of September.

Nearly every country in the world is represented now as well (which was NOT the case when we last checked the analytics in January 2020!). Check it out - with the exception of a handful of countries (15, in fact) primarily in West Africa, we've had at least 40 separate logins and often many, many more from every country on the planet! The bulk of our users continue to come from the US, Canada, England, Australia and the Netherlands (hi, Jolanda!), but we've seen big upticks in India, Western Europe, Russia, Finland and Sweden. It's fun to think about the many different cultures, ecosystems, languages and perspectives represented in our volunteer pool!

We've seen some interesting changes in where folks are classifying from in the United States as well. For the life of our project pre-pandemic, the majority of our users were logging in from Minnesota (which makes a ton of sense). We also had many volunteers from Illinois and Oregon. Things have shifted a bit on the leaderboard, and we now see more unique pageviews from California, Texas, Illinois and New York than we do from Minnesota! 

And remember our pleas for volunteers from Mississippi and Arkansas to join us so that we could get all 50 states colored in on our map? That seems like so long ago. Mississippi is still the state with the least unique pageviews at the moment, but folks have visited the website 22,632 times!! And Arkansas has even more at 160,627. Incredible! 

We hope that wherever you are classifying from in 2020, you are staying healthy and safe. We really appreciate all your contributions to our work understanding the world around us here in Minnesota!