Citizen science The term citizen science (synonymous to terms like community science, crowd science, crowd-sourced science, civic science, participatory monitoring, or volunteer monitoring) is research conducted with participation from the general public, or am ...

projects are activities sponsored by a wide variety of organizations so non-scientists can meaningfully contribute to scientific research.

Precis

Activities vary widely from transcribing old ship logbooks to digitize the data as part of the Old Weather project to observing and counting birds at home or in the field for

eBird eBird is an online database of bird observations providing scientists, researchers and amateur naturalists with real-time data about bird distribution and abundance. Originally restricted to sightings from the Western Hemisphere, the project e ...

. Participation can be as simple as playing a computer game for a project called Eyewire that may help scientists learn more about

retina The retina (; or retinas) is the innermost, photosensitivity, light-sensitive layer of tissue (biology), tissue of the eye of most vertebrates and some Mollusca, molluscs. The optics of the eye create a focus (optics), focused two-dimensional ...

neuron A neuron (American English), neurone (British English), or nerve cell, is an membrane potential#Cell excitability, excitable cell (biology), cell that fires electric signals called action potentials across a neural network (biology), neural net ...

s. It can also be more in depth, such as when citizens collect water quality data over time to assess the health of local waters, or help discover and name new species of insects. An emerging branch of Citizen Science are Community Mapping projects that utilize smartphone and tablet technology. For example, TurtleSAT is a community mapping project that is mapping freshwater turtle deaths throughout

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country comprising mainland Australia, the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and list of islands of Australia, numerous smaller isl ...

. This list of citizen science projects involves projects that engage all age groups. There are projects specifically aimed at the younger age demographic like iTechExplorers which was created by a 14 year old in the UK to assess the effects of bedtime technology on the body's

circadian rhythm A circadian rhythm (), or circadian cycle, is a natural oscillation that repeats roughly every 24 hours. Circadian rhythms can refer to any process that originates within an organism (i.e., Endogeny (biology), endogenous) and responds to the env ...

and can be completed in a classroom setting. Other projects like AgeGuess focus on the senior demographics and enable the elderly to upload photos of themselves so the public can guess different ages. Lists of citizen science projects may change. For example, the Old Weather project website indicates that January 10, 2015, 51% of the logs were completed. When that project reaches 100 percent, it will move to the completed list.

Worldwide

Citizen scientists anywhere in the world can participate in these projects.

Regional

These projects require that citizen scientists be local to a region of study.

Asia

Australasia

Europe

North America

External links

OpenHumans
—

quantified self Quantified self is both the cultural phenomenon of self-tracking with technology and a community of users and makers of self-tracking tools who share an interest in "self-knowledge through numbers". Quantified self practices overlap with the pract ...

projects
SciStarter
— SciStarter lists more than 3,000 active and searchable global citizen science projects

Notes

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Citizen science projects Science-related lists *