Chicago Wildlife Watch explores wildlife that utilize public spaces such as these coyotes foraging in a park on the Northwest Side of Chicago. (Courtesy of Urban Wildlife Institute/Lincoln Park Zoo)

What do you do with a mountain of scientific data that’s sitting around waiting to be processed? In today’s world of 24-hour connectivity, you enlist the help of the Internet. That’s one of the ideas behind Chicago Wildlife Watch, a crowd-sourcing project that lets anyone with a connected device help local researchers with a massive science project on Chicago’s urban ecosystem.

Scientists are trying to answer questions about where our wild neighbors go, which species are most common and which may be in decline, how they compete with one another, and how humans impact their choices. The story is told with the help of camera traps, small motion-triggered devices set up four times a year at more than 100 locations across the city and suburbs.

"What we're trying to do is figure out how urban animals make decisions, that's sort of the holy grail for me,” said Seth Magle, Ph.D., Director of theUrban Wildlife Institute,a research division of the Lincoln Park Zoo that looks at interactions between people and wildlife. “If we could understand what causes them to move around the landscape in a certain way, how they select habitat, how they live, then we can actually start to design smarter cities. How we can design cities that can be a home to wildlife and to people without creating human-wildlife conflict."

Here’s how it works: Users go to the site, click “Get started” and then look at photos of animals captured by the cameras. Buttons prompt users to select what type of animal is in an image – “deer,” “muskrat” and “fox,” for example – before moving on to the next capture. Each camera snaps photos for a month during seasonal setups, and, as anyone who owns a digital camera or smartphone can imagine, the photos pile up quickly.

About 900,000 were loaded into the site in September 2014. It’s taken roughly a year to get to the halfway point with more than 5,500 active users pitching in. All the while, more photos are being collected.

“No one has ever collected this much data on urban wildlife before,” said Magle. “It's really an unprecedented kind of a study, and that's why we need so much help.”

Seth Magle, Ph.D., Director of the Urban Wildlife Institute, secures a camera trap that is used to capture data for Chicago Wildlife Watch. (Courtesy of Urban Wildlife Institute/Lincoln Park Zoo)

Welcome to the Zooniverse

Partnering on Chicago Wildlife Watch with Magle's group at the Lincoln Park Zoo isAdler Planetarium’s Zooniverse team, a citizen-science project developed with the University of Oxford that runs dozens of projects around the globe.

Billed as "the largest online platform for collaborative volunteer research,” the Zooniverse has a massive reach. Volunteers around the world can annotate WWI soldiers’ diaries, identify and organize sunspots, and analyze cancer data, among other projects. You can even use historic ship logs to help with climate model projections. All from your desk, couch or CTA seat.

Magle says that the Zooniverse team, which has a local office at Adler, was interested in doing research in Chicago. He wrote up a proposal, outlined his ideas, and they agreed to take on the project.