A contribution to the 14th Biennial Conference on University of Education in Natural Resources, hosted in March 2022 by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's School of Natural Resources and College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources. Bruce Eichhorst, South Dakota State University. Content is the property of the authors under the Creative Commons agreement.
Use of the Snapshot Wisconsin citizen science initiative to engage students in an introductory wildlife course
Snapshot Wisconsin is a statewide wildlife monitoring program developed and coordinated by the Wisconsin DNR. Volunteers host trail cameras throughout the year and upload their photos to be stored and posted on Zooniverse, a citizen science web portal. Volunteers then classify the photos to identify animals, thus aiding the WDNR in assessing and understanding trends in the distribution of wildlife populations in the state. In an introductory fisheries and wildlife management course I have students conduct a project utilizing the Snapshot WI portal. Students classify photos, thus aiding them in developing their animal identification skills, and input selected data into an Excel worksheet. After pooling the worksheets from all the students, they then conduct a series of analyses on the entire data set, and finally answer several questions related to the variables they analyzed.