Reserve Sponsorship Opportunity

With over 40 partners and more showing interest after our official launch, SnapshotSafari has a lot of ground to cover. Many parks and reserves that would like to establish a camera-trap grid for monitoring their wildlife populations lack funding, or they do not have sufficient funding to maintain a camera-trap grid for several years.

How you can help: By donating to the UMN Lion Center, you can support the installation and maintenance of camera-trap grids in unfunded locations. By becoming a part of the SnapshotSafari network, these reserves gain the opportunity to collaborate with other parks and reserves and utilize the wealth of data collected from other sites to better understand their wildlife populations and best practices in conservation.

What Does Sponsorship Include?

SnapshotSafari works in three key areas: Research, Conservation, and Education. Your contribution will be used to support each of these areas as well as the future development of SnapshotSafari.

• Research & Conservation
  Many sites require financial assistance to purchase equipment. Donations help cover the cost of installing infrared cameras and their associated supplies, (memory cards, rechargeable batteries, hard drives, safety cases, etc.). In addition, this will support the development of a specific webpage within the SnapshotSafari citizen science platform, so users can classify the photos collected from that site and learn more about the site’s unique features, staff, and conservation efforts. A small portion of this amount goes to data management and storage fees for use of the Zooniverse.org platform and the Minneapolis Supercomputing Institute (MSI), as well as salary support for our skilled team of researchers at the UMN Lion Center who handle all of the data uploads, provide summary reports to the participating reserves, and conduct our own research on predator-prey dynamics, trophic cascades, and the spatiotemporal distribution of wildlife in response to environmental perturbations.
  
  Your contribution may also be used to help maintain existing grids, as cameras are occasionally lost due to wildfires, theft, and tampering by wildlife. Baboons, elephants, and hyenas are especially likely to investigate and move our cameras when their curiosity is piqued!
   
• Education
  The UMN Lion Center has partnered with Howard Hughes Medical Institute to develop educational materials that can be used in middle school, high school, and undergraduate level courses to teach ecological principles. These materials use the photographs and classification tools available on the SnapshotSafari platform to engage students and teach them about wildlife, endangered species, and forming and testing hypotheses. In the near future, SnapshotSafari aims to translate these materials into several African languages and develop unique curriculum for use in African classrooms.

Sponsorship Benefits

• World-Wide Citizen Science Engagement: Participating reserves will generate 50,000+ photographs annually, which will engage tens of thousands of citizen science volunteers interested in learning about African mammals and their behavior and ecology.

• Visibility & Media Coverage: Snapshot Serengeti received media coverage from the New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, and Guardian, and was highlighted in several documentary films in Europe and North America. The expansion of SnapshotSafari will likely produce a similar flurry of international interest and recognition. As a sponsor, you will be featured prominently on the portal through which volunteer citizen scientists, media, and scientists access the project.

• Educational Programming: Citizen science lends itself to exhibit and outreach development. Sponsors will be able to view and analyze the photos generated by each reserve’s camera-trap grid through the SnapshotSafari web portal. The Zooniverse citizen science platform is easy to use, and participants enjoy contributing to meaningful scientific research. As the project continues, participants will be encouraged to use the data to investigate their own hypotheses and make their own educational products.

Interested in becoming a sponsor? Please contact UMN Lion Center Project Coordinator, Jamee Snyder at snyde566@umn.edu or leave a message (612) 618-0409.

SnapshotSafari is made possible by support from the following sponsors.