Calgary Connect
Citizens engaged in urban wildlife monitoring
Calgary Connect, formerly Calgary Captured, a Calgary Parks initiative, is happy to announce that season 5 is now live! We hope that this will provide you and yours with some fun wildlife identifying activities as you contribute to important Citizen Science data collection efforts!
The City of Calgary, in partnership with Miistakis Institute, launched Calgary Connect in 2017. This multi-year wildlife monitoring and citizen science based program is intended to study urban wildlife populations, their movement and behavior, and enable informed conservation and management decisions that support healthy wildlife populations in our city. There are over 70 motion-activated trail throughout Calgary’s urban parks and green spaces – including over 20 in Fish Creek Provincial Park – which capture thousands of wildlife images per month, including deer, coyote, bobcat, fox, moose, cougar, black bear, and many others.
Thanks to a “machine learning model”, developed by the City’s Corporate Analytics and Innovation team and in partnership with the Miistakis Institute, all images are scanned to filter out those with humans or no animals in them, removing those prior to volunteers classifying the various wildlife species using the online Wildtrax platform. So, all you will see are the amazing wild critters who we share our urban green spaces with, and who use these spaces as wildlife corridors to safely navigate the City.
We are exited to share the results of the first three years of data collected through this great partnership project!
Calgary Connect Annual Report 2023
Calgary Captured Results Summary 2021
Calgary Captured Technical Report
Finally, thank you to all of the Friends of Fish Creek Camera Crew volunteers, who check Fish Creek’s wildlife cameras each month, to ensure they are in good working order, and to swap out new batteries and camera cards for the used one. We are also grateful to the volunteers who take on the essential behind the scenes role of photo classification. They are critical to the success of this program!
