Urban Wildlife: Calgary Captured
We’ve all been spending more time at home to help limit the spread of COVID-19. Calgarians have the privilege of enjoying a large variety of wildlife throughout the city. And thanks to technology and the Calgary Captured Zooniverse, you don’t even have to leave home to see all the wildlife in the parks.
Calgary Captured is a citywide citizen science program that has installed over 69 wildlife remote cameras in 17 parks across the city. So far, with the help of Calgarians, this program has catalogued over 200,000 images of wildlife in our city, and recently released 34,140 new photos.
Calgary captured is seeking help from all Calgarians to help identify wildlife.
How you can participate:
- Going to Zooniverse.org: and search for Calgary Captured to begin identifying species.
- Join the Conversation: be sure to click the #talk button on the last screen before you submit your observation to let us know if you found something really great!
“Calgary Captured began as a way to address an existing data gap and an opportunity for Calgarians to actively participate in helping The City gather more information on wildlife in our urban environment. People can view, classify and chat about images, enhancing their knowledge of biodiversity in Calgary, all while helping with a critical step in data processing,” Said Lynette Hiebert, Parks Ecologist with Calgary Parks.
Calgary Parks, along with its partners, use information from this monitoring program to make better decisions when planning parks and other City spaces, to understand where wildlife is in the city and to better understand and manage human/wildlife interactions.
The Calgary Captured program provides value in two broad ways; it generates much needed information about Calgary’s wildlife, and engages citizens to help with that process. It provides a cost-effective and collaborative (CC is a partnership) way to capture data about the wildlife, habitat and movement around our urban environment. And, it engages citizens in a participatory way through the Zooniverse platform. We often refer to this as citizen eco-literacy and participatory stewardship action.