Zooniverse is a

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 ...

web portal A web portal is a specially designed website that brings information from diverse sources, like emails, online forums and search engines, together in a uniform way. Usually, each information source gets its dedicated area on the page for displayin ...

owned and operated by the Citizen Science Alliance. It is home to some of the Internet's largest, most popular and most successful citizen science projects. The organization grew from the original

Galaxy Zoo Galaxy Zoo is a crowdsourced astronomy project which invites people to assist in the galaxy morphological classification, morphological classification of large numbers of galaxy, galaxies. It is an example of citizen science as it enlists the he ...

project and now hosts dozens of projects which allow volunteers to participate in

crowdsource Crowdsourcing involves a large group of dispersed participants contributing or producing goods and services, goods or services—including ideas, Voting, votes, Microwork, micro-tasks, and finances—for payment or as volunteers. Contemporary ...

d scientific research. It has headquarters at

Oxford University The University of Oxford is a collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the second-oldest continuously operating u ...

and the

Adler Planetarium The Adler Planetarium is a public museum in Chicago, Illinois, dedicated to astronomy and astrophysics. It was founded in 1930 by local businessman Max Adler (Sears), Max Adler. Located on the northeastern tip of Northerly Island on Lake Michigan ...

. Unlike many early internet-based citizen science projects (such as

SETI@home SETI@home ("SETI at home") is a project of the Berkeley SETI Research Center to analyze radio signals with the aim of Search for extraterrestrial intelligence, searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. Until March 2020, it was run ...

) which used spare computer processing power to analyse data, known as

volunteer computing Volunteer computing is a type of distributed computing in which people donate their computers' unused resources to a research-oriented project, and sometimes in exchange for credit points. The fundamental idea behind it is that a modern desktop ...

, Zooniverse projects require the active participation of human volunteers to complete research tasks. Projects have been drawn from disciplines including

astronomy Astronomy is a natural science that studies celestial objects and the phenomena that occur in the cosmos. It uses mathematics, physics, and chemistry in order to explain their origin and their overall evolution. Objects of interest includ ...

ecology Ecology () is the natural science of the relationships among living organisms and their Natural environment, environment. Ecology considers organisms at the individual, population, community (ecology), community, ecosystem, and biosphere lev ...

cell biology Cell biology (also cellular biology or cytology) is a branch of biology that studies the structure, function, and behavior of cells. All living organisms are made of cells. A cell is the basic unit of life that is responsible for the living an ...

humanities Humanities are academic disciplines that study aspects of human society and culture, including Philosophy, certain fundamental questions asked by humans. During the Renaissance, the term "humanities" referred to the study of classical literature a ...

, and

climate science Climatology (from Greek , ''klima'', "slope"; and , '' -logia'') or climate science is the scientific study of Earth's climate, typically defined as weather conditions averaged over a period of at least 30 years. Climate concerns the atmospher ...

. , the Zooniverse community consisted of more than 1 million registered volunteers. By March 2019, that number had reportedly risen to 1.6 million. The volunteers are often collectively referred to as "Zooites". The data collected from the various projects has led to the publication of more than 100 scientific papers. A daily news website called 'The Daily Zooniverse' provides information on the different projects under the Zooniverse umbrella, and has a presence on

social media Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the Content creation, creation, information exchange, sharing and news aggregator, aggregation of Content (media), content (such as ideas, interests, and other forms of expression) amongs ...

. The founder and former principal investigator (P.I.) of the project,

Chris Lintott Christopher John Lintott (born 26 November 1980) is a British astrophysicist, author and broadcaster. He is a Professor of Astrophysics in the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford, and, since 2023, Gresham Professor of Astronomy ...

, published a book called ''The Crowd & the Cosmos: Adventures in the Zooniverse'' in 2019. In September 2023 the role of P.I. was taken over by Laura Trouille, VP of Science Engagement at the Adler Planetarium, who was co-P.I. for Zooniverse from 2015-2023.

Citizen Science Alliance

The Zooniverse is hosted by the Citizen Science Alliance, which is governed by a board of directors from seven institutions in the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Northwestern Europe, off the coast of European mainland, the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...

and the

United States The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...

. The partners are the

Johns Hopkins University The Johns Hopkins University (often abbreviated as Johns Hopkins, Hopkins, or JHU) is a private university, private research university in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. Founded in 1876 based on the European research institution model, J ...

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota Twin Cities (historically known as University of Minnesota) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint ...

National Maritime Museum The National Maritime Museum (NMM) is a maritime museum in Greenwich, London. It is part of Royal Museums Greenwich, a network of museums in the Maritime Greenwich World Heritage Site. Like other publicly funded national museums in the Unit ...

University of Nottingham The University of Nottingham is a public research university in Nottingham, England. It was founded as University College Nottingham in 1881, and was granted a royal charter in 1948. Nottingham's main campus (University Park Campus, Nottingh ...

and Vizzuality.

Projects

Art projects

Space projects

Nature and climate projects

Biology Projects

Humanities projects

Physics projects

Retired projects

Project Builder

Zooniverse supports Project Builder, a tool that allows anyone to create their own project by uploading a dataset of images, video files or sound files. In Project Builder a Project Owner creates a workflow for the projects, a tutorial, a field guide and the talk forum of the Project and can add collaborators, researchers and moderators to their project. The moderators for example will have partial administrator rights in the talk, but cannot change anything concerning the workflow.

Zooniverse Mobile App

Only certain kinds of projects can be enabled on Zooniverse mobile app (Android & iOS).

References

{{CitizenScienceNavBox Science websites Astronomy projects Human-based computation Citizen science Internet properties established in 2009