SquirrelMapper

SquirrelMapper makes a familiar backyard animal into a continent-scale research question. Volunteers sort eastern gray squirrel photos by coat color and sometimes identify predators; the team combines those judgments with habitat and location data to study why black squirrels persist in some landscapes and fade from others.

What is SquirrelMapper?

A squirrel is a squirrel until SquirrelMapper asks you to look twice. The eastern gray squirrel comes in gray and black coats, and those morphs are not scattered randomly across the map. This Zooniverse project turns community photographs into repeat classifications, using at least ten volunteer judgments to settle each animal's color before the team connects the result to habitat. That large, shared sorting effort has already supported published work spanning more than 60,000 records in 43 North American cities. The pleasure is modest and oddly sticky: inspect the fluff, choose carefully, and watch an ordinary park resident become evidence about urbanization, climate, and natural selection.

What you can do there

• Classify eastern gray squirrels by coat color
• Identify squirrel predators in submitted images

Why we picked it

The task is immediately legible, but the question behind it has real bite. Coat color is easy enough for a newcomer to notice, yet the accumulated answers support serious comparisons across cities. It is a tidy example of citizen science where small judgments can scale into a research-grade dataset.

How to get the most from it

Begin with the tutorial and learn the project's rules for gray, black, and unclear animals before classifying. Pay attention to the whole animal rather than a dark shadow or wet patch. If a photo is ambiguous, revisit the guidance or bring the case to Talk instead of forcing a confident color.

Good to know

The landing page currently says 45 percent complete while showing zero active subjects and classifications, so the live queue may be between batches. Historical totals on the project site are much larger. No isolated classifier, account, accessibility, mobile, audio, or wildlife-content check was available for this review.

Who made it, and when?

Bradley Cosentino and James Gibbs is the credited creator or organization. The earliest supported launch date we found is July 5, 2019.