We are very proud to announce that the NestCams project has now officially launched!
NestCams is a Citizen Science Project developed with our partners at the Core Facility Konrad Lorenz Research Station for Behavior and Cognition (Konrad Lorenz Forschungsstelle) on the Zooniverse platform.
In it, citizen scientists can investigate the breeding behavior of two bird species that each has both different breeding strategies.
One is the greylag goose, a ‘precocial’ species, which means that at hatch, the young can feed and move independently.
Parent geese form long-term monogamous bonds, and the female alone provides care at the nest.
The second one is the endangered northern bald ibis, an ‘altricial’ species, which means that its offspring are born blind and featherless and therefore require a lot of parental care before they can feed or walk on their own. Ibis pairs are seasonally monogamous, and both pair partners provide care at the nest.
This study aims to identify which behaviors at the nest predict which breeding pair is successful or unsuccessful at producing hatchlings that survive. The project is run by researchers of the University of Vienna and is funded by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency.
The automatic camera systems have been mounted in the nesting places since 2018 and have recorded a vast amount of data.
At SPOTTERON, we did the icon design and organisations, so that now you can join in at zooniverse.org and take part in this great citizen science project by watching the video clips, classify if the bird is standing or sitting and identify the behaviour of the bird in the video.