Chicago has its pigeons, squirrels, seagulls, sparrows, and occasional coyotes, but what else is out there? Chicago Wildlife Watch, a new project collaboratively developed by the Adler Planetarium, the Lincoln Park Zoo, and Zooniverse, aims to answer this question using the Internet hivemend to help document and classify animal sightings throughout Cook, Lake, DuPage, and Will Counties, including downtown Chicago. As one of many similar projects led by Zooniverse, Chicago Wildlife Watch, is a "web-based citizen science project" that relies on "volunteers to help researchers deal with the flood of data that confronts them." Users are free to peruse and classify animals on the website's nearly 615,000 images taken from motion capture cameras planted at area parks, preserves, and other stations. And if you're lucky enough, you might even be able to spot the elusive Chicago River hippo.
·Chicago Wildlife Watch [Official Website]
·Wild Things archives [Curbed Chicago]