If you study urban wildlife and you want to gather information, don't forget the power of social media. That's what Marcus Mueller and Dr. David Drake have done in Madison, Wisconsin, to support their study of urban foxes and coyotes.

"We hoped to get a better idea of where foxes and coyotes were spending their time by mapping out reported sightings by the public. After a call for sightings by a university publication, my adviser received almost 70 individual emails from Madison residents regarding foxes and coyotes. After the Facebook page was launched, sightings continued to come in, along with pictures and videos taken from citizens' backyards. These sightings directly led to the capture and collaring of several individuals."

With such success in reporting sightings, the team thought their Facebook followers might be up a new task: collecting poop.

The team uses scat to learn more about the diet and health of the canids. Collecting coyote scat is easy enough for the team as coyotes tend to spend most of their time in parks and preserves. But foxes, on the other hand, spend most of their time in private backyards and neighborhoods, and not so much in public spaces.