Category: Citizen Science

Using Celebrate Urban Birds (CUB) to Meet Common Core and Next Generation Teaching Standards   Grades: K-12th Description: Celebrate Urban Birds (CUB) is a project through the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. It is a year round project specifically designed to engage classrooms with local urban birds and citizen science. Cornell offers a free classroom kit for […]

Record plant observations and learn how changes in climate and habitat affect a plant’s lifecycle with Project Budburst. Track the phenology of plants and animals with these citizen science projects. Gardeners worldwide have their favorite sayings about when to plant, when to reap, how much rain is going to fall, or how dry it will […]

Has anyone noticed how much media coverage citizen science is getting? Bird counts, tree monitoring, bee cataloguing, water testing, ocean analyses, air sampling and star gazing—the list goes on and on. When the European Commission published an in-depth report in December of 2013 on whether or not participatory science influences policy, I thought—whoa, citizen scientists […]

Per the Environmental Protection Agency, the average American spends 90% of their time indoors. At the same time, when we think of citizen science, our mind’s eye often pictures the great outdoors: wide expanses of open space, jutting mountains, birds in trees, and frogs sitting near meandering streams. In part, that’s due to a perception […]

Science can be WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic), but researchers are working to change that. Four years ago three researchers in the Department of Psychology at the University of British Columbia published an article in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences entitled “The weirdest people in the world?” The authors, Henrich, Heine, and […]

Fatigued from measuring all that April precipitation? Embrace cheerful blooms all around you and share your phenology observations (seasonal changes in plants and animals, year to year) with these citizen science projects. Find more phenology projects on SciStarter. Don’t miss this new post from DISCOVER Magazine and SciStarter’s  Citizen Science Salon!   Project BudBurst Choose a plant to monitor and […]

Help researchers determine accuracy of satellite data by capturing and uploading ground observations from your phone. Want more citizen science? There’s an app for that. We may not realize it, but artificial satellites are responsible for so many aspects of our daily lives.  They dictate our ability to communicate with one another, assist in the […]

Non-profit citizen science organization Paleo Quest is very excited to partner with SciStarter at the USA Science and Engineering Festival (Hall DE, Booth Number 5337). Paleo Quest researcher John Nance will share marine fossils that are up to 25 million years old with attendees. Each fossil that will be on display was collected by the non-profit’s […]

Headed outside? Learn more about how you can help report invasive species with the What’s Invasive? smartphone app! Want more citizen science? There’s an app for that. I first visited Southern California in the spring. The hillsides were covered in emerald green grasses and spotted with great old Valley Oak trees—a landscape that is known […]

It’s Earth Day! Celebrate the planet we live on with these amazing environmental citizen science projects! The Earth Day Network records that in 1970 the average American was funneling leaded gas through massive V8 engine blocks, and industry was exhausting toxic smoke into the air and chemical slush into the water with little legal consequence […]