On May 3, LSA Professor Nyeema Harris and her lab in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology launched the Michigan ZoomIn camera project on the Zooniverse website.

Last fall, Harris's team, which includes masters student Corbin Kuntze and others, installed more than 150 digital cameras at multiple wilderness sites in Michigan, including LSA's Biological Station. The cameras are triggered by motion to automatically photograph animals that pass by, allowing the researchers to study Michigan's fauna.

The team now is soliticing the public's help in identifying and categorizing the animals photographed by their camera "traps."

"It's a massive field effort followed by a massive identification effort involving hundreds of thousands of images," said Harris. "So our citizen scientists will be a huge help to us, whether that person is an elementary school student in Detroit or a retired accountant in Montana."

Interested participants are invited to visit the project's site at Zooniverse. Click "Get Started" to begin. 

Read Michigan News's story about the project, which includes a video.