Cicada Safari

Mount St. Joseph University

About this app

People have been recording periodical cicada emergences for nearly four centuries. These maps have been critical in verifying the cicadas’ long life cycles and the relationships of the broods to each other.

Help us map the 2021 emergence with Cicada Safari! Your submitted photos will be used to determine the range of Brood X.

Ratings and reviews

Crowd sourced research for science matters, making this a great app... that said, as an app it is less then sterling. The most glaring "missing" or "broken" aspects are: (1) that the notifications are useless, no ability to click one to see which image it is talking about and that the number of them seems unrelated to reality (I get hundreds more than I have pictures taken); (2) an "delay uploads of reports until next connected to wifi"; (3) that videos seem to never be accepted or rejected; (4) that jpg files are stored in DCIM rather than a subfolder; (5) I so far have not figured out where videos are stored, seems like with Camera they should be in the same location as the jpg files.

Just installed tonight so the jury is still out but I'm confused already. I thought a good place to start was with my profile. I selected edit, and tried to add a pix, like a profile pix, it let me choose it but won't upload it. Not a good start! Hopefully the functionality of the app will improve tomorrow when I'm out running errands and perhaps finding opportunities to add pictures of the little guys! Stars will be added when things improve!

App is a bit clunky but they're working on it (it's a research project and I applaud the effort). App developer is responsive to emails. One potential improvement would be to use EXIF data or photo geotags to place images on the map. Right now it appears they post where uploaded, not where captured. Another idea might be use a heatmap to display sighting frequency and overlay markers at a closer zoom level.

What’s new

- Optimizations for location data retrieval