Lincoln Park Zoo and Partners Launch Behavior Video Sharing Resource

As part of its commitment to community leadership in animal care and welfare, Lincoln Park Zoo has long created technical tools that it offers for free to other organizations—including ZooMonitor, which is used by hundreds of organizations around the world to track and analyze animal behavior. This year, a new addition has joined the stable of software created by the zoo’s welfare science experts.

It’s called the Behavior Video Sharing website. By gathering videos of different species, this website creates a visual library full of information on what specific animal behaviors look like. It’s designed to help support researchers and data collection volunteers by expanding beyond simple text descriptions of behavior to provide more robust training that yields reliable information that can be used to improve care for animals.

Reliability Testing: Live Viewing vs. Video

Rigorous training is essential for generating high-quality data, since animal observers must be consistent in accurately recognizing behaviors and recording them properly. At Lincoln Park Zoo, new volunteer observers undertake a five-week process during which they learn about the basics of animal behavior, discover how to use ethograms (detailed catalogs of animal behaviors), and get instruction on using ZooMonitor.

These observers are tested in-person against a trained data collector to make sure they can reliably recognize what behaviors to record. In some ways, doing this testing live can be preferred, because the conditions are often identical to what observers would be experiencing in real-time, regular observations—complete with distractions, other animals in view, and habitat obstructions. But there can be issues.

“When you rely on just doing live reliability testing, you are at the whim of what the animals are doing that day,” Animal Welfare Science Program Director Jason Wark explains. “Every data-recording session can be different, so everyone is getting a different test. That’s problematic if you’re trying to ensure observers can reliably identify behaviors and the animals only display a fraction of the behaviors you want to test for. If a majority of the behaviors aren’t occurring during a reliability test, we aren’t sure if people can identify them going forward.”

He notes that many behaviors in animals—especially social behaviors that are more context-specific, versus “maintenance” behaviors such as eating and sleeping—can be hard to define without a visual reference.  These behaviors also occur less frequently, making live observations of them during reliability testing less likely. Thus, using video showing those behaviors can be a good alternative. Observers can view the recorded versions, and, having seen them, know what to look for and how to record them.

But that means video must exist of animals doing the desired behavior, whether it’s moving around, feeding, or socializing. While Lincoln Park Zoo started compiling a video library years ago to support training zoo volunteer data collectors, not all zoos have the capacity for building these kinds of resources. However, zoos working together can create repositories of animal knowledge that will benefit all.

Image by Todd Rosenberg

Building Bridges

Using ZooMonitor, many zoos have established ongoing behavior monitoring programs. Some zoos have already developed behavior video libraries they can refer to as well. Lincoln Park Zoo, for example, began this process in 2016 when it built a standardized ethogram to help define behaviors and keep the naming consistent. The year after, ZooMonitor Research Coordinator (then an intern) Natasha Wierzal began compiling behavior videos, tracking them, and storing them for future reference.

Unfortunately, these video libraries were siloed and didn’t talk to one another. The newly launched website is designed to fill in that gap. “In some ZooMonitor-related conversations with other zoos (link to article about multi-institutional studies) back in 2022, one of our collaborators noted that others had started to build those video libraries and we could be much more efficient if we shared our resources with each other. The ideal is to build bridges,” says Animal Welfare Science Program Director Jason Wark.

To that end, welfare science experts at Lincoln Park Zoo, Detroit Zoo, Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden, and North Carolina Zoo collaborated to create a relatively simple cloud-based spreadsheet to compile and share their behavior videos with one another. It included information that allowed zoos to understand what species were at partner zoos, making collaboration easier and more seamless. That ended up being the pilot for a larger library project. It wasn’t a particularly polished package, but it was a start.

Then, Wark and collaborators worked with staff at Tracks Data Solutions, the software developer behind ZooMonitor and longtime collaborator with Lincoln Park Zoo, to build a video library sharing site in the Animal Data Sharing network,  a family of websites that allow institutions that care for animals to share information. This platform was a perfect fit, as it already had websites for sharing information that can help zoos improve welfare, including enrichment ideas and animal records to facilitate collaborations across zoos.

A Behavior-sharing Website for All

This spring, Tracks Data Solutions’ BehaviorVideoSharing.org launched as a free, searchable website that allows individuals to upload brief video clips of animal behaviors. Anyone can add their videos or use videos shared by others to help with their own data-gathering work. Individuals adding videos can control the ownership and privacy of videos, sharing them publicly or restricting access on a per-user basis through secure web links.

Behavior Video Sharing’s library is growing and, at the moment, features almost 1,000 short (under two-minute) videos of 144 species. Lincoln Park Zoo and partners are working on spreading the word through various networks, including the Association of Zoos and Aquariums community and the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums community.  Lincoln Park Zoo and Tracks Data Solutions are also planning to integrate access to videos from the sharing site within ZooMonitor—with the video owners’ consent—ensuring these tools can talk to one another while maintaining privacy settings.

With increasing behavior monitoring at zoos and aquariums around the world, thanks to ZooMonitor, zoo staff hope this new video sharing site provides a useful resource to zoo professionals around the world seeking to learn about animals in their care and guide data-informed decisions to enhance welfare.