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Results and Publications
We are currently analyzing data from our validation and piloting work and writing up two manuscripts for publication in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Check back in 2025 to see all the results! We will be publishing in an open access journal so you don't need to spend money or be part of a university to learn from our work.
Publications
Kitizen Science's first validation study tested our approach's most basic assumption: whether online volunteers can correctly identify and match individual free-roaming cats in smartphone photos. In comparing a group of volunteers drawn from the cat advocacy sphere to a reference group of life science college students (who are often trusted to do photo identification in traditional academic research), the cat advocate group performed significantly better both in terms of quality and quantity of work. We also explored factors related to what makes a volunteer more accurate at identifying cats and what makes some cat photos more identifiable than others. This validation work is important because it adds transparency to our research methods, demonstrates that cat-loving volunteers in our citizen science program can perform a key task at a high level of accuracy, and gives us insights into what type of volunteers we should focus on recruiting to the online side of our research. Read the full article here in the open access journal Citizen Science: Theory and Practice.
Presentations
In 2022, we were invited to speak on cat population research methods and our work to date at the Humane Society of the United States' Animal Care Expo.
In 2021, we presented a poster on our photo identification validation study at the International Urban Wildlife Conference and the CitSciVirtual Conference.