Wildlife at its best! This surely is the apt description of the vivid imagery shot by 225 remote cameras employed at the Serengeti national park in Tanzania between 2010 and 2013, capturing nearly 48 different species in their natural habitat.

The project published on June 9 in the journal Scientific Data was undertaken by Alexandra Swanson, an ecologist and a doctoral student who set up 225 camera traps around the park in 2010.

Swanson aimed to study the natural interactions of the Serengeti's predators with their ecosystems. Swanson conducted the study for three long years and amassed 1.2 million sets of images.

Alexandra Swanson stated, "When we first started getting these photos they were just breathtaking. You're seeing these animals at their most authentic. You just see things you'd never otherwise see, these animals making ridiculous faces, peering into the camera, running toward the camera".

Swanson and his colleagues from the University of Minnesota collaborated with Zooniverse, a citizen-science platform which created www.snapshotserengeti.org to make these multiple photos available across all registered users for interpretation.

The website was launched in 2012 and has 30,000 visitors who have helped to make 10.8 million classifications, identifying 40 different species.

Margaret Kosmala, studying organism and evolutionary biology at Harvard University and the study researcher, claimed, "The Snapshot Serengeti project came about to evaluate spatial and temporal dynamics of large predators and their prey".

She asserted that the resulting images can be used for a variety of areas, for educational purposes, for deeper ecological research and it would also help scientists to answer a multitude of other questions as the data is now open for public use.