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We've been forced to close due to lack of funding. We're now in the process of analyzing data to share from our extensive validation and piloting work!
Kitizen Science was founded to build a better evidence base about how targeted sterilization programs affect the size of free-roaming cat populations in urban and suburban North America with the applied goal of learning the most effective ways of reducing free-roaming cat overpopulation using cat-friendly methods.
Traditional research spends a large amount of money collecting data to publish articles in paywalled scientific journals that are read only by academics — an opaque process followed by inaccessible results. In contrast, Kitizen Science was created to conduct applied research on a smaller budget, transparently, to help solve real world problems. As an innovative, tech-enhanced citizen science program, we developed the world's first smartphone app for collecting data for photographic mark-recapture population studies.
Unfortunately, we were unable to obtain funding to continue conducting our research, so we had to end our Chicago study before we could collect enough data to draw meaningful conclusions. While we won't be able to accomplish what we set out to do, we have two more manuscripts coming about how we set up and validated our unique citizen science research approach. This ensures that our time and effort can still help future researchers design better cat population research.
Check back in 2025 to see all the results! We will be publishing in an open access scientific journal so you don't need to spend money or be part of a university to learn from our work.